Waiting for 'Numbers'

Well finally it is out. Numbers from Apple. Well it is also accompanied by praises to Apple from Macworld, CNet etc etc. What I am wondering is are these guys who reviewed in any ways associated with data analysis on a spreadsheet at all. Apple makes a whole lot of stuff that is 'not just a pretty face'. With Numbers though that is what it is - 'Just a pretty face'. I have been using Excel since mid nineties and it is the ultimate in number storage and analysis for common users. Apple should be aware of the dent it is making into the PC world among the academics. There are brilliant softwares like Chemdraw, Papers, R, Jmp, Stata, Filemaker and many many others that are... to repeat again just brilliant. And then there is this 'I am a mac, I am a PC' ad that ridicules a PC when it says it is going to spend time GUI programming or working on spreadsheets. At a certain point of time computers are not just fun packages but a productivity enhancer. Numbers totally knocked me off. As an academic researcher, my view is that it is no use to any of us. We do not want colorful business graphs. Even the savviest of the business gurus often do not realize the importance of error bars. It does not involve a lot of codes to make it happen. In it's urge to make it simple Apple has dropped out a lot of features like managing the color of individual groups of bars in a graph, ability to control the width of the bars manually, ability to outline a bar individually with no fills at all (it seems to be somewhere hidden inside but not obvious). Numbers must have the ability to quickly scramble a chart out in pdf and must also have formatting features very similar to some of the publication quality graphics (no not the wall street journal graph but at least that). May this is just a first step and Apple will get to make it work like a mash up of both filemaker and excel in the days to come. So I am not impressed but it is a start. Right now I am still struggling to sort just a column of numbers in the ascending to order... hmmm...