The problem isn't the lack of workarounds. The problem is that we have all departments - Purchasing, Marketing, Operations/Warehouse, Sales, Finance, IT - working with sku's in spreadsheets. Every single time, every single person needs to know the workaround(s), and as other people are mentioning, you then have to hope it's not somehow saved as something else. And also as mentioned, if someone else has worked with the data before you get it, good luck restoring it to what it was before.
But yes we'll probably stick a letter in there.