Checkvist story

Slightly technical: export a list to spreadsheets (CSV)

Recently we’ve received a question about exporting lists into CSV format, which allows you to open tasks in a spreadsheet application, like Excel or Numbers.

While we don’t (yet) provide any user-friendly way to do this, it’s possible. Might be a bit too technical, but with some understanding of working with command line you can already use it.

The main idea of the export is to use XSL transformation to convert the list, exported in OPML format, into a CSV file. The generated CSV file will contain task parent path, task name, last modification date, status, due date, and tags columns.

If you’re a programmer, you can even modify the XSL template to tune it for your needs (there are some explanations inside).

To the battle:

1. Download the opml2csv.xsl file from github
2. In the file, set the correct CSV separator (but most likely, this step is not needed, the default separator is ‘;’)
3. Download Saxon home edition
4. Unzip downloaded saxonhe9-3-0-5j.zip , you’ll get saxon9he.jar file
5. Download and install Java JRE, if you don’t have it already (JRE would be enough, JDK is not needed)
6. Export Checkvist list to an OPML file (see ‘export’ command in the toolbar)
7. Generate CSV file with the following command (make corrections in paths):

   java -jar path/to/saxon9he.jar -s:path/to/checkvist33223.opml -xsl:path/to/downloaded/opml2csv.xsl -o:path/out/target_file.csv

8. Open generated target_file.csv file in Excel/Numbers whatever.
9. That’s it.

Thanks Douglass Yeager for the inspiration and interesting request :)