[Goober5000]

CSV might be easier, faster, and less prone to incompatibility errors.

I've had good luck with OpenCSV.

[asyikarea51]

Cool. XD

I dunno, having "Name" show up reminded me of the days when I used to muck around with Red Alert 2's... rules (their "tables") using an application... and nothing was obvious at first glance. Or was it not Red Alert 2 or some other game... ugh, I can't remember really.

Obviously I later got around to editing the text files manually with Wordpad, but in a way that app helped me get a rough idea of what (most) of the text in them rules files meant. IMO FSO is better documented, all the more so with a wiki, but who knows where the next wannabe modder for FSO will start from.

That said, what's the export to spreadsheet for? I have not yet experienced "proper" beta testing and release of a mod so I don't know the usefulness of an export function. (and no i'm not being sarcastic, i honestly don't know.) I've only done one OpenOffice spreadsheet for some weapons, and that one was pretty much manually typed, I'm not well-schooled on office suites anyway (be it MS or OOO).

[m!m]

The spreadsheet is useful when you want to balance weapons and/or ship stats so you only have to modify one value and the rest would be calculated. Fury explained it in this thread.
I have also attached a zip containing two exports of the retail ships.tbl in CSV and XLS formats.

[attachment deleted by admin]