[support] Filling taxonomy fields

[Roger]

I'm starting a new Drupal 7.23 site utilising pagemanager and panels, 
following Johan Falk's 13 video tuts.
The site will be a rebuild of an existing live site but with a different 
focus and will use much of the existing taxonomy data.
Taxonomy data is Books and Authors, Localities, Venues, Contacts, Quotes 
and the like.
Current site is events based, new site will be newsletter based, events 
data will be just one part thereof for inclusion in the news format but 
the taxonomy data is needed for the newsletter items and to facilitate 
events entry in a controlled format.

Is there any way:
  - I can copy the content of previous taxonomy field data over to a new 
database table/field of the same name without manually cutting and 
pasting each one?
  - To copy the date format settings over to the new?
My problem is much of the data is affected by workbench so I cannot 
simply reuse the database because any data containing workbench 
references will fail.

Backup and restore copies the workbench stuff so that's not helpful.
phpmyadmin will copy the right fields but these have workbench 
references and cause errors in the new system.

I'd appreciate any help or advice on how to do this
thanks in advance
Roger