Where are you exporting to? For what purpose? With what intention?

The most generally useful export format for Contact data is a CSV file which you can open in a spreadsheet program, and re-arrange the columns to your heart's content.

So the necessary tools exist already. Thunderbird doesn't need to be burdened with infrequently used spreadsheet-like capabilities.

Thanks for the reply.

I have recently upgraded a computer from XP to 7 and the user had Outlook 2003 installed. She does not have a license for Outlook so I installed Thunderbird.

She has a list of users in a mailing group that she exports every week into excel and this acts as a register for meetings she has.

In Outlook she could export to excel but only include the fields she wanted, so she would include the full name of the people attending the meetings, a box for week 1-5 where she can mark if the person attended the meeting and another custom field for something else.

I have shown her how to create a mailing list and export that list to a csv format to open in excel. This includes all of the unused fields though and she does not like that. She doesn't want to manually edit the spreadsheet either.

Thanks.

double post

Currently, there is no function to select specific address book fields when exporting a mailing list or address book to .csv file.

However, after opening the .csv file in Excel or OpenOffice.org Calc, it is simple to highlight several columns, right click and select delete then save the file. Just tried this myself and completed the editing/removing columns etc in less than 10 seconds. So, it is not difficult and extremely quick.

I know this is not what you would prefer, but it works very easily, is simple to learn.

While your solution doesn't solve my problem it is the easiest workaround so I will mark it as solved.

I have told the user about how to edit the csv file but I don't think she likes doing that.