Wish it were true

I’ve watched the reports of Pages 3 and a rumored Numbers spreadsheet application from Think Secret. Alas, their track record is near zero in terms of accuracy (though some of their leaks do, eventually, come to fruition in some tangential form). I can only hope that the touted January release date might actually come to pass with Leopard in a few months. OS/X desperately needs a good replacement for the dated, poorly integrated and just lousy Microsoft Office suite.

Ironically, not a single thing mentioned in Think Secret’s peek at Pages 3 matters to me or those I work with—we purchased iWork in hopes of being able to get away from Office. It hasn’t panned out because of a few, fatal limitations in Pages. In case anyone at Apple is listening, here they are:

1. Section number bugs (aka “tiered numbering” in Pages). Pages has a bug that causes erratic section numbering behaviors, most often demonstrated when a section number (such as “1.8.2″) truncates all but the last number (so it shows up as “2″ only).
2. Support for cross-references. That is, the ability to automatically generate references to other parts of a document by target bookmark, such as “see section XYZ on page 123.”
3. Automatic numbering of symbols, for instance figures. If you want to number your figures today, such as “Figure 1,” “Figure 2″ and so on, it’s a manual process. Heaven forbid you want to insert a figure at the beginning of the document!

Until Pages can support these basic word processing requirements, I’m afraid it’s suitable for letters, memos and the occasional newsletter only. Unfortunately, much of the business world needs a word processor capable of handling longer documents, often with numbered figures and contract-like section numbers.