Sufferin' Security Setup Situations

We're trying to do an overhaul of our security settings by rearranging rights, merging different groups, etc.   but the manual process is very time consuming.  Is there any quick way to create new Security User Groups through a bulk insert of some kind so I don't have to go into each of them one by one to set up their Security Object rights?

I know most of the tables involved behind the Security module interface.  Can't I just convert the massive spreadsheet I was given into some sort of .csv file and do it quick and clean like?