Polaris Office: Edit&View, PDF

Review by eFreeware

Documents have a way of arriving when you are nowhere near a computer. A contract lands in your inbox on a Saturday morning, a colleague sends a spreadsheet while you are waiting for a coffee, and the file needs a small correction before it goes back. Carrying a laptop for those moments is overkill, and forwarding everything until later rarely works out.

Polaris Office, from Polaris Office Corp., is built for exactly that situation. It is a free Android app in the Productivity category that opens, edits and saves office documents, and it has been doing so for a long time: the first release was in February 2014, and it now has more than 50 million installs. It holds a 3.4 average across 619,465 ratings, which is a middling score for a tool this widely used, so I would go in with realistic expectations rather than assuming it will feel polished in every corner.

Who gets real use out of it

The clearest fit is someone whose document work is occasional but genuine. You need to read a PDF on the subway, fix a typo in a report, fill in a spreadsheet cell or trim a slide before a meeting, and you want one app that handles all of those rather than a separate viewer for each format. Polaris Office is designed as that single destination.

Students and office workers who move between a phone, a tablet and a desktop are the other obvious group, because the app syncs documents through Polaris Drive or through services such as Google Drive, Dropbox, Box and OneDrive. If you already keep your files in one of those, the app slots into a setup you have rather than asking you to build a new one.

The app also supports eighteen languages, including English, French, Arabic, Japanese, Russian, German, Italian and Spanish, which matters if you work in more than one of them. Android 6.0 Marshmallow is the floor for the operating system. The download is around 60 MB, so it will not crowd out much storage on a modern phone.

What it opens and how it edits

Format support is the core of the pitch, and it is broad. The app handles DOC, DOCX, XLS, XLSX, PPT, PPTX, PPS, PPSX, TXT, HWP, HWPX, ODT and PDF, and CSV was added recently. In practice that covers the Microsoft Office family, the older PowerPoint show formats, the open document standard, plain text and the Hangul word processor files used in Korea.

The developer describes the suite as compatible with Microsoft Office and Google Docs, so files created elsewhere should open and save without conversion gymnastics. PDFs can be viewed directly on the phone, and other document types can be saved out as PDF, which is the quickest way to freeze a draft before sending it.

Editing goes beyond typing. There is a handwriting mode that lets you draw on the screen as though you were writing with a pen, which suits annotating a document or sketching out an idea when a keyboard is awkward. You can also pull a photo straight from the camera into a document or insert a video clip from the phone, which is useful for reports that need visual evidence rather than description.

Sharing, comments and keeping files in step

Collaboration is handled through links. You can share a document through cloud storage by SMS, email, Facebook or another channel, which is simpler than attaching files and hoping the recipient has the right software. Comments can be left on documents, PDFs included, and colleagues can be invited into a conversation inside the app to settle revisions before anything is printed.

Syncing is the thread that holds this together. Documents stay current across a desktop, a tablet and an Android phone through Polaris Drive or one of the other supported cloud services. For anyone who edits the same file in more than one place, that is the feature that decides whether the app is useful or merely convenient.

The developer has also added document-based generation tools and describes the suite as an all-in-one office app. I would treat the broader claims about creativity and productivity as marketing rather than a specification, and judge it on the formats it opens and the files it keeps in sync.

What it costs, and what the ads mean

The app itself is free to download, and it carries advertising. There is also a one-off purchase to remove ads priced at $10.99, which is the option I would weigh first if the ads bother you.

Beyond that, Polaris Office sells subscriptions. The Smart Plan is $3.99 per month or $39.99 per year, the Pro Plan is $5.99 per month or $59.99 per year, the AI Plan is $12.99 per month or $129.99 per year, and the AI-Plus Plan is $20.99 per month or $209.99 per year. Prices are quoted in US dollars and may differ by country.

Which features you get can depend on your subscription and your cloud usage. Subscriptions renew automatically, and cancellation has to happen within 24 hours before the next renewal date, through the Google Play Store or Google Wallet. That is a standard arrangement, but it is worth diarizing if you sign up for a month to try the premium tools.

Where a dedicated app may serve you better

A suite this broad is a compromise, and the trade-off is depth. If your work is almost entirely spreadsheets with heavy formulas, a spreadsheet-focused app will usually feel more natural than a general office package. If you live in PDFs and mostly read, mark up and sign them, a dedicated PDF tool is likely to be quicker to learn.

The same applies to writing. Someone producing long-form text every day may prefer an editor built around that single job, with the formatting and export options that go with it. Polaris Office is designed to cover many formats adequately rather than one format exceptionally.

Cloud storage is another consideration. The app works with several services, but if you have already settled on one that is not among them, the sync story becomes less appealing.

A dependable choice for documents on the move

Polaris Office is a mature, wide-ranging Android office suite that opens the formats most people actually receive, edits them, exports to PDF, syncs through several cloud services and adds handwriting and camera input on top. For occasional document work on a phone or tablet, that combination is hard to assemble from separate apps.

The caveats are straightforward. It is free but ad-supported, with a $10.99 ad removal purchase and subscription plans running from $3.99 to $20.99 per month. It needs Android 6.0 or later. The 3.4 rating is worth noting, so I would treat the premium tiers as something to try rather than commit to immediately.

My recommendation is for people who need one app to handle Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files on Android and who already keep documents in a supported cloud service. If your needs are narrow, a specialized tool will likely serve you better; if they are broad and occasional, this is a reasonable place to start.

What's new in version 9.9.22

PO Update News! · Update for a More Stable Service We’ve refined various issues and improved overall performance so you can use the service with greater confidence. If you ever encounter inconveniences or have suggestions, please feel free to let us know! Your feedback plays a big role in helping us grow. With the all-new Polaris Office, let’s make it better!