Is it necessary to have pages on mac to have it on iPad?

Question

Hello people! I am thinking of getting pages for iPad and I was wondering if it is necessary to have pages on mac to have it on iPad, because I don't own a mac or a computer with pages on it... Any help.

Answer 1

Just typed a long message here and when trying to post it, got an error message and it didn't post.
I upgraded today to iOS 6 on my iPad 3 and iPhone 4S.  I was excited with the possibility of syncing documents between my 2011 MBP and my iPad and iPhone.  I've already upgraded to Mountan Lion 10.8.1. 
I purchased Pages and Numbers for my MBP today and was very pleased with the way Pages works and how well it synced between the devices.  I moved a couple of Word docs to Pages and was pleased with the way it went across. Only a very few problems, fonts, title center, etc.  Nothing serious and easy to fix.  It syncs back and forth between the MBP and iPad just fine.
Not so with Numbers.  I first tried moving a simple spreadsheet from Excel (Office 11 on the MBP) to the iPad.  Went through the tutorial and found it workable, but most difficult to use.  So, I moved the spreadsheet to Numbers on the MBP, expecting it to be easy to use, like Pages was.  Not so.  I had three identical tables in the spreadsheet with eight rows and twelve columns to track monthly data over a years time.  Only function used was a simple average.  When the spreadsheet arrived in Numbers (moving it first through Dropbox and then to Numbers) the header was gone (simple title) and the function was gone (replaced with a number).  So, it should have been easy to replace the header and select the average function, get it working on one row and then copy and paste it to the rest of the rows and columns.  It was murder trying to get it to work.  The controls were difficult to use, kept locking up and so I had to redo or delete and start again.  When it finally worked (just a simple average), it was difficult to copy and paste to the other rows and columns. 
There is no way to insert a page break.  If you have two pages, you can only insert and delete rows until the tables are on the correct pages.  It was difficult to change the font sizes.  Difficult to change the cell spacing.  No margin contol (very crude was to set them in the "inspector". 
No way to not print grid lines.  Found some suggestions in this forum, but they didn't work.  It still printed the grid lines (although faintly). 
But the worst thing was that it doesn't sync between the MBP and iPad3 without changing the formatting.  In fact, when you save the spreadsheet on the MBP and then go to the iPad3 to open it in Numbers, you get a warning that the formatting will change and that you should open a copy if you want to sync it back to the MBP. 
I spent several hours working on this.  Finally got a usable spreadsheet.  It all for naugt, as it won't sync without changing the formatting. 
I've been using spreadsheets for several decades, mostly with many versions of Excel, Lotus, Open Office, Word Perfects spreadsheet (can't remember the name).  I've designed some pretty exotic spreadsheets and use them almost daily (in Excel).   This is the worst spreadsheet program I've ever tried to use.  I won't be able to use it to sync between the MBP and iPad3.  I'm sticking with Excel and Dropbox and can only look at the spreadsheet in the iPad3.  I don't feel as bad about the wasted $40 for the two copies of Numbers as I do for the hours of wasted time trying to make it work. 
It sure isn't as good an app as is Pages.  I can use Pages and it works!