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With the advent of web-based spreadsheets, data has freed itself from its shackles. Khebab made an important first cut by contributing his oil production data to the editgrid on-line spreadsheet here. To grab the data, select what you need and then paste to a clipboard; in the end you can easily create a nice space-delimited flat file.

Geko45 also contributed his own apparently painstakingly collected data as an Excel spreadsheet. Unfortunately, placing the data in a proprietary format like Excel demonstrates the limitations of such an approach -- I for one couldn't load this data set reliably into Quattro.