How to export Descriptions and Notes?

Here are two options, both straightforward but not simple.

  1. You could export to XML (uncompressed), if you know how to use XSLT to transform the data, or have other tools for processing XML, but that is not trivial.

  2. You could export to SQLite (this is different than the underlying SQLite database that your tree is stored in). Even if you don’t know any SQL, it doesn’t take much effort within SQLite to simply dump each table to a csv file, but there are two complications. The first one is that the SQLite export does not include all of the translated strings that correspond to the numeric constant values (see this posting for details). If you don’t need those strings, then you don’t have to worry about that. The second complication is that you would need to relate (join) all of the individual csv files, using the “handle” columns which are included in the data. It seems like that would be a lot of effort in Excel. (Or if you know SQL, you can just create whatever joined views you like within SQLite and then export those to csv.)