Yeah, I've done the excel bit with \n and \t as well. I have a little text-munging javascript app I wrote for splitting and merging things in certain ways.
I also use the excel -> db route a lot, but I'm working with MS SQL Server so I'll just do the data import from excel to db.
I get dirty looks sometimes when I talk about doing things this way, but it's really handy. If I know I'm going to have to do something more than once, I'll usually write a quick script for it, but otherwise, quick ad-hoc text manipulation with ST, excel and the javascript scripts I have is pretty fast and really flexible.
Flexibility is the big thing for me. Often I won't think of every way I really need to manipulate the data right out of the gate, so being able to quickly work through and change things is handy.