Years ago I was doing QA for a flight simulator, and they decided that we would add every airport in the US to it. Not detailed for most, just number of buildings, runway orientation, etc. The FAA conveniently published the info, so they bought a stack of little blue books and had half a dozen of us transcribe them into Excel over a few days.

Of course the data was available on disk, but the boss didn't want to take the risk of nobody in our giant building full of computer programmers being able to crack the government's database format.