We run into a similar issue all the time were certain social media APIs return ids as strings that look like very long numbers. When opened by non-technical researchers and (invariably) overwritten by them, these ids will have been converted into scientific notation by Excel with the resulting loss of precision rendering the ids useless.

We now do a cleaning step prior to handing data to researchers where "id_" is prepended to the field to prevent Excel from casting these integer strings to 1.23E10

super cool story!