Notes/Domino 4 and 5 Forum

I have a customer that wants to export his local addressbook data to Excel. When we try to export it as a 123 worksheet or as tab text or as structured text, the data doesn't come out the desired way. What we tried is to design a custom view with the fields in the right order etc. But when I design a new view an insert or append a column to it and refresh the view, the data disappears from the view and even after deleting the new column, it doesn't come back. Are we overlooking something here ? Or is there an easier way to do this export ?