If you use the Enterprise Architect edition of Microsoft Visio for data modeling regularly, then there is a good chance that at some point you've wanted to export just the table names into Excel. You might want to do this to map logical ERD entities to physical data model tables, track project status by entity, or track overlap between database versions.

Regardless, it turns out to be non-trivial to perform this export, particularly if you are unable to generate to a database to retrieve the table names. The trick is to use the reporting feature of Visio, but there are many reports and report options, and you will need one that is table-based to get the data into Excel easily.

Note: If you are unfamiliar with the capabilities of Microsoft Visio as a data modeling tool you may wish to take a look at my Data Modeling in Microsoft Visio Tutorial.

Export Procedure

1. This may seem a little unusual, but if you don't have any comments in any of your tables (which really shouldn't be the case), you will need to add comments for at least one of your tables. Without this step Visio will not display tables in a grid format in the report.

2. Now select the somewhat obscure "Report" item off of the "Database" menu.

3. Only the "Table Report" provides the ability to layout database tables in a grid. Select it and click Finish.

4. Under "Predefined logical/physical reports" Click the button labeled "Default To: General Report" and change it to "Default To: Database Report." This will remove tables formatted per page from the end of the report.

5. Under the "Attributes" tab select "Deselect All" then select the "Table stats summary" option.

6. Click "Export to RTF," save the file somewhere, and open it with Microsoft Word.

7. (optional) If you have any new lines in the notes field you may have to replace them with spaces. Just do a search and replace for "^l" and replace with " ".

8. Now you're ready to copy and paste.

And you're done! Hopefully this tutorial will make life easier for you next time you need to export table names from Visio to Microsoft Excel.