Are you suggesting that it's not possible to migrate a database from on environment except by re-typing everything - Good Grief !
A decade or more ago, the Australian telephone directories were all rekeyed in each year and the data sold on CD. The businesses had access only to the dead tree directories and OCR was less accurate than Asian typists.
I've done quite a few translation/merges of data using Excel and Word for partial automation, but manual fine-tuning was required. Unless the dataset was very large, manual rekeying was often cheaper albeit with some loss of accuracy.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
