"I have to go in and tedioulsy (manually) copy down the "parent" row values".
It seems to me someone once posted a way to have Excel do that for you, but I do not recall the details now. Perhaps they will post again.
"It would be very good if the exported format file did not use these blanks ...".
Except for those who wanted the data just as it was in Quicken.
You should be able to significantly reduce the number of blank fields from split lines by your choice of sequence in the Quicken report.
If you sort Quicken report transactions by Category, for example, Quicken should automatically open all the splits and sort all the transactions/split-lines on Category.
And unless there are two or more split lines for the same transaction with the same Category, all the fields (columns) for split lines should be populated; since a split line not located with its parent (or other splits from same parent) would otherwise be lacking a knowable date, payee, num or account.
[When you initiate a discussion; you should include your Quicken year, edition, and release; and your operating system. Example: Q2017 Deluxe R16.2; Windows 7. And the country, if not U.S.]
Peter Isakson said: That Excel trick is helpful, but doesn't really apply to my case. That is useful when you have a few "header" type values with a lot of blanks below each "header" row. In my case it is rather a lot of "headers' with perhaps 1, 2 or 3 rows each with balnks. It is still very tedious to do each one manually. I suppose I could try writing amacro to do this, but I don't want to bother.