I might have posted this in the wrong spot earlier (comment approved but don't see it) so posting again-apologies if a repost:

Hi Richard, great lesson!  I'd really appreciate some discussion on "when normalization and imports collide".
Let's take the following example (related to class materials).  I already have Anna Picore in my database as a customer.  I have a sales department and am relying on their users to populate excel import templates for customer comments.  Now we have a conflict-the sales team doesn't think of Anna Picore as Autonumber 12.  Also, say in addition to adding the comment, I have a "comment type" and following good database normalization methodology, I don't simply have "inquiry, comment, feedback", I have commenttypeid 1, 2, and 3.  Well now that sales rep has to populate an import template with customerID=12, commentID=2, Comment=Rick is a swell guy.    
Any thoughts from a broad strategic level on the clash between good normalization and not driving coworks crazy with "weird" import templates?  Are there some tips/tricks to keep good normalization while making the population of import templates more friendly to the "non-db expert" eye?  
My end users want to think of users as people, comment types as actual comment types, account types as actual account types etc without having to look up what the corresponding autonumber is.

Really appreciate both Richard's and the rest of the class's thoughts on this!
B

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Reply from Richard Rost:

Well, if you have other people entering data about your customers into a spreadsheet, and you want to be able to EASILY import that data later, you need SOME kind of key field. You can make up your own secondary key if you want... perhaps call Anna Picore "APICORE" or whatever, but if they just go by her name, then you run into problems if you someday get a 2nd Anna Picore in your database.

Instead of having your users put data into Excel sheets, the BETTER solution is to make them a remote data-entry database, like I'm going to show in either X21 or X22.