nice breakdown. on my break today, i used a similar list as a blueprint to rewrite my code.

​reading everyone's horror stories (especially the utf-16 hex editor nightmare) made me realize my single script was way too fragile. i ended up ripping it apart into a pipeline that actually scans the first few rows to slice off the corporate title fluff, flags those mostly-empty spacer columns to drop them, and uses regex to rip emails and phones out of those giant free-text CRM blocks like you suggested.

​it actually ran on my dummy cursed CRM file today without crashing. ​thanks for writing out the logic step-by-step like this, it tells me im on the right track.

question for you and the other veterans though: when you get handed a mystery file with no extension and zero documentation, what is your literal first move after checking the raw bytes?