Exporting to Excel from Numbers without TOC

Apple has finally announced iWork 08 and it includes Numbers, their take on the traditional spreadsheet. I have downloaded the trial and had a play with it, and while it might not satisfy the scientific or academic community, it does mostly what I need.

One annoyance however is that when you export your Numbers spreadsheet to Excel it will include a table of contents explaining how your sheets and tables were converted worksheets. While this might be helpful, it's not likely to be appreciated in a business environment.

So here is how you get Numbers to not include the table of contents when you export to an excel spreadsheet:

Simply edit your com.apple.iWork.Numbers.plist file in ~/Library/Preferences to include an additional key called "EEDropTableOfContents" and set it to TRUE.

From Terminal you can simply type

defaults write com.apple.iWork.Numbers EEDropTableOfContents
-bool TRUE

To edit it as an XML document you need to run

plutil -convert xml1 ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iWork.Numbers.plist

then add an entry that looks like this:

<key>EEDropTableOfContents</key>
<true/>

Or if you use Property List Editor included with the developer tools it will look like this: