Only recently I stumble over Quest “ActiveRoles Management Shell for Active Directory”, a free cmdlets for scripting with AD as a source (and destination). For example, all you need to spool users with their descriptions from AD into csv file is this one liner:

[PS] E:\>Get-QADUser -sizeLimit 0 | select name, Description | Export-Csv ADusers.csv

In addition to “ActiveRoles Management Shell for Active Directory”, you’ll need to install PowerShell itself and Microsoft Core XML Services – if they’re not already installed on your machine (Quest installer will prompt you if that’s is the case).
In “Quest Software” program directory you’ll find link named “ActiveRoles Management Shell for Active Directory” which starts PowerShell.

One problem that I could not find a solution for, is related to spooled file encoding which will loose all non-ASCII characters in my environment (CP1250 for GUI, CP852 for command prompt), even after specifying UTF8 encoding like this:

[PS] E:\>Get-QADUser -sizeLimit 0 | select name, Description | Export-Csv ADusers.csv
[PS] E:\>$OutputEncoding

BodyName          : utf-8
EncodingName      : Unicode (UTF-8)
HeaderName        : utf-8
WebName           : utf-8
WindowsCodePage   : 1200
IsBrowserDisplay  : True
IsBrowserSave     : True
IsMailNewsDisplay : True
IsMailNewsSave    : True
IsSingleByte      : False
EncoderFallback   : System.Text.EncoderReplacementFallback
DecoderFallback   : System.Text.DecoderReplacementFallback
IsReadOnly        : True
CodePage          : 65001

I also tried with console encoding:

[PS] E:\>$OutputEncoding = [console]::OutputEncoding
[PS] E:\>$OutputEncoding


IsSingleByte      : True
BodyName          : ibm852
EncodingName      : Central European (DOS)
HeaderName        : ibm852
WebName           : ibm852
WindowsCodePage   : 1250
IsBrowserDisplay  : True
IsBrowserSave     : True
IsMailNewsDisplay : False
IsMailNewsSave    : False
EncoderFallback   : System.Text.InternalEncoderBestFitFallback
DecoderFallback   : System.Text.InternalDecoderBestFitFallback
IsReadOnly        : True
CodePage          : 852

No luck – in .csv file all “special” characters are lost.