Selecting only parent tasks for Gantt timeline

Hi everyone, I've been investigating the Gantt view to put some best practices together so that our project teams use it more when generating timelines for their clients. When you export a Gantt, it exports all of the task lines unless you select only the ones you want, which is very often the parent tasks showing the major project stages (we would usually wish to not show all the internal process subtasks). Does anyone know of a way to select only the parent tasks without automatically selecting all of the associated sub-tasks? Usually when you select the parent task, it also selects all the sub-tasks underneath it - which is fine if you need to select the whole section for project edits. But if you only want to show the parent tasks for a Gantt chart, you end up selecting everything when you click on the parent task and then de-selecting all the sub-tasks you don't want, which is a huge job on big projects and doesn't seem very efficient. Thanks! Mike Michael Hagger