how to prevent tab characters being converted to spaces when using IPython in Spyder

In IDLE Python if I do print "atb" I get output that looks like: a[TAB]b If I do the same in IPython in Spyder then I get output that looks like: a[7 spaces]b I like to output tables of data as tab delimited text to make it easy to copy from the console to Excel. But if the tabs get converted to spaces it makes it more difficult. Is there a setting within IPython or Spyder somewhere that controls the display of TAB characters? I am using Spyder+IPython on a Windows 10 desktop. I realize I could just write the data to a file but in this case it is more convenient to use the console and the clipboard.