OK I figured this out and will post here for others who may need to do similar thing.

Here's the method:

1. export from sketchup to OBJ format. Even with sketchup OBJ export set to not export lines and textures it still does, which makes the OBJ very hard to understand. I think this is a sketchup bug
2. import from OBJ using MeshLab
3. do whatever cleanup you need. In my case I need to remove zero area faces
4. export from MeshLab to OBJ, deselect all tick boxes during export, result is that OBJ file is now clean..first section is vertices, second is faces. Note GTS export from MeshLab seems to have a bug as it does not export all vertices
5. import to Excel as space delimited file
6. copy and paste into your other programs

Success!

I thought that might be the case but I verified the model is solid with the Outer Shell tool. The method Trogluddite proposed seems to produce a cleaner output but the export from MeshLab isn't working properly...only half the vertices are exported from MeshLab for some reason.

Thanks for the help so far. sdmitch I tried your plugin and it works 95%. There are a couple of triangulated faces that it generates that are reversed and also there are a couple of triangular faces that it generates that are not there in the model. I've ensured the model is solid and has no internal faces, or at least I think I have. It says I don't have enough posts to send you a PM yet.

Thanks. I think some of the 3D exports will export faces and this information could be reused but I haven't dug into it yet. I'm not enough of a Sketchup expert to know how to write some code to do this.

Here's what I am looking for...

A way to extract vertices and faces (think this is correct terminology) to a CSV.

Vertices would have X, Y, Z coordinates with a number ID
Faces would be triangulated sets of X, Y, Z coordinates

e.g.

Vertices:
1 0, 0, 0
2 1, 0, 0
3 1, 1, 0
4 0, 1, 0

Faces
1 2 3
1 3 4