<p>Anyone have a good set of sqlplus configuration directives to help transform a given sql query into nicely tab separated output for pulling into a spreadsheet or further processing?</p>

Check out the Oracle documentation:
Formatting SQLPlus Reports
Generating HTML Reports from SQLPlus
You can generate a tab in Oracle by using the tab's ASCII value 9 and the chr function:
```
```
select chr(9) from dual;
```
```