OK I figured this out and will post here for others who may need to do similar thing.
Here's the method:
- 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
- import from OBJ using MeshLab
- do whatever cleanup you need. In my case I need to remove zero area faces
- 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
- import to Excel as space delimited file
- copy and paste into your other programs
Success!