Re. the loss of leading zeros (due to Excel):
I've been re-looking at the raw data & have improved my regular expressions so that it'd be a bit less manual work to re-do the data into columns (mostly), but the thing is that I think the only way to prevent Excel stripping the leading zeros is to put a ' before them, and unlike where one does that manually
within Excel, if I do that to the text file
prior to importing into/opening with Excel (that's the only reasonable/manageable way, given the quantity), then they remain visible within excel. That is: Excel then doesn't treat them as "special" characters.
So: that way keeps the leading zeros but also prepends a '. So I still wonder whether it's really worth all the effort of re-doing the data?