Export to Excel or other table

I want

  • c
    • b

to be sent to Excel with c in column 1 and b in column 2.

Anybody have a path to achieve this? If Export-Plain Text had an option for Tab indentation style, then Excel could convert the tabs to my target, but the current options don’t seem viable.

Replace “[newline][indentation char]” with some character, and let that character be the delimiter? (Assuming you’re not handling more complicated cases, that is.)

Just to be clear, I don’t think it’s within an outliner’s scope to export to table/csv though. They are simply not compatible formats and different people will have different ideas on how one should be convert to another.

I agree CSV is too much, but there’s no clear method to get there with the current output. How exactly do I achieve “Replace “[newline][indentation char]” with some character”? The Plain Text export doesn’t provide an Indentation character, it’s always 4 spaces. If I could set an option to make it ‘>’ (or any custom character), then Excel could use that as a delimiter.

But there is no custom indent option. It would be great if it did though. Currently there is only a line prefix option (*, - or nothing).

This?

Can you use any of these as the delimiter character?

That does not achieve the goal. If I choose asterisks, I get
* stuff
(space space space space) * stuff.

Using asterisk as a delimiter puts everything in column 2.

What’s needed is a single character in place of each set of 4 spaces. E.g., a tab.

I thought something as powerful as Excel would accept using four spaces as delimiter. Apparently I was wrong.

In that case you need to do a little pre-processing: replace 4 spaces with a star:

The result looks something like this:

DataStruct
 * Must have (Core)
 *  * Table/grid view
 *  * Supported types
 *  *  * Primitive
 *  *  *  * Number
 *  *  *  * Boolean
 *  *  *  * String
 *  *  * Advanced
 *  *  *  * Link to other object
 *  *  *  * Link to many other objects
 *  *  * Enforce type
 *  * Template engine
 *  *  * Design syntax
 *  *  * Parser (parse template to internal)
 *  *  * Renderer (fills in data)
 * Must have (Civ)
 *  * Types
 *  *  * Civ
 *  *  * Unit
 *  *  * Building
 *  *  * Tech
 *  *  * Social policy
 *  *  * Terrain
 *  *  * Resources
 *  * Civ theme

Then import this to Excel by setting delimiter to *.