This is my first post here, although I am not new to Excel. I am writing "codepage" files for FontLab. These are plaintext files which contain a basic header followed by a list of indexes, codepoints, and character names. There are more than one hundred thousand of these entries, and they are separated into six text files, each of which contains 65536 index lines (not including headers). I can use macros to write the indexes, but what I really need is for Excel to grab the codepoint and name data from the Unicode website and sort it into these codepages for me. (Doing this by hand is not fun. It took me more than 20000 entries to decide it wasn't worth the effort to do it manually.)

So this is what I'd like to happen:
(1) I create a workbook with 8 worksheets. Six (1 - 6) are designated for the six codepages, one (sheet 7) is for importing data, and the last one (8) is for me to input custom data (for macros to use).
(2) I use a macro to generate the header information and the 65536 indexes in sheets 1 - 6. (I think I already know how to do this.)
(3) Excel imports data from http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/NamesList.txt to sheet 7. (The TXT is tab-delimited. Multiple tabs should be treated as multiple delimiters, and it is extremely important that all the columns be imported properly.)
*The trick here is that I have been unable to successfully import this data. I have attempted linking to the data through Insert -> Object -> Create from File, but the object is interpreted as an "htmlfile" and turns up blank. I copied all the text in the file and tried Paste Special, but the Paste Link option was not available and Source was empty. I used Get External Data From Web, but the text imported incorrectly. (The hexadecimal numbers were treated inconsistently; 0001 became 1 while 000A stayed 000A. Also, a number of lines beginning with = were mistakenly interpreted as formulas and returned #NAME?.) I also tried Get External Data From Text, but it would not accept web addresses. (It did work fine with a local copy of the file, though.)
(4) A macro (or macros) scans the imported data and copies the appropriate information to the corresponding indexes in sheets 1 - 6. A handful of special cases and additional rules are applied from sheet 8. (I haven't worked all this out yet, of course, and I'll probably be back here when I get around to it.)
(5) Excel exports sheets 1 - 6 as plaintext, tab-delimited files, preferably straight into Notepad++ where I finalize them and export them for FontLab.

The other big question, though, is this: Can I make Excel periodically check http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/NamesList.txt and update my workbook when the file changes? (I know I've seen functionality like this in Connections.) Better yet, is there a way (probably through a separate program, I would guess) to check for updates and have Excel automatically open and update my workbook when that happens (i.e. without my intervention)?

Thanks in advance,
TM