Checklist items are indistinguishable from parent tasks in CSV export

[jmsgwd]

The CSV export shows checklist items looking almost identical to their parent tasks. This makes it extremely difficult to distinguish checklist items (which are like mini-tasks inside a task) from actual tasks.

This means you cannot, for example, filter out checklist items to see only tasks in Excel, or vice versa.

Checklist items have the same Title and URI as their parent task in the CSV. The Subtask column is always empty, regardless whether it's a checklist item or task. Checklist items do not have tags - but neither do some tasks, so this isn't a reliable way to distinguish them.

The only difference I can see is this:

• in a task, the Notes field contains the task's notes
• in a checklist item, the Notes field contains the name of the checklist item

However the notes field and checklist item names are both free text fields in Things.app. This means you cannot distinguish tasks from checklist items in the CSV, unless you remember what you wrote in those fields, which is different for each task and does not scale.

Ideally, checklist items would not only be distinguishable, but also appear directly underneath the task they relate to in the CSV (although that's probably harder to implement).

An alternative would be to list all checklist items for a given task in a single multi-line cell, so a task and all its checklist items have only one row in the CSV.