The spreadsheet is called a "deathlist" - and it is just that. Produced by United, a Netherlands-based anti-racist network, it charts where and how migrants have died trying to make it into Europe. The list of 6,336 dead isn't so good on the question of "who", as many of the bodies have no identification.
Covering the past 12 years, the list has been compiled from newspaper clippings, official reports and evidence supplied by pressure groups across the Continent. It's a grim litany of individual tales of despair, known only after the person has died.
Among the most recent cases cited are people thrown overboard by pirates, blown up in minefields on the Greek-Turkish border, or dying of hunger on rafts off the coast of Spain. The list also includes those who have died despite making it into Europe. Some have killed themselves rather than be deported; some have died from illness or malnutrition on the streets; still others have been murdered by racists.
The list builds a picture of the deadliest parts of the European border. Most of those whose bodies have been recovered were travelling by boat. While Britons sun themselves on the Mediterranean coast, thousands are dying out to sea. The Straits of Gibraltar and the passage between North Africa and Italy are particularly bad.
According to United, 2,421 people have died on Spain's border and 2,245 on Italy's. Roughly 150 people are recorded as having died in England, but mostly such refugees are dead when they get here.
For each body recovered from the sea, it is estimated another two are lost for ever. If these people haven't drowned, they may have starved or died through lack of medical attention.
Migrants suffocate in lorries or on container ships, freeze on the underside of planes or on mountain passes, and die in accidents after jumping, dazed and confused, out of the backs of trucks. Around 15 per cent of those on the list died at the hands of the police or border guards, or in the process of fleeing from them. More than 140 died in custody.
Just 444 of the 6,336 arranged their own passage, indicating that people-smuggling remains a profitable and popular crime. Most of the dead migrants come from Africa and the Middle East, with peaks from other countries as civil unrest or economic collapse forces people to move.
The problem with this deathlist is that it records only the fact, not the human detail. It states simply "NN" for those unknown. It might say "Chinese" or, even more vaguely, "sub-Saharan Africa". Here and there the gender is noted and, every hundred or so names, "child".
The gaps are filled in only on the rare occasions when a death makes the headlines. At one point the list details the 58 Chinese migrants who were found suffocated in the back of a lorry in Dover in 2000. Yet it quickly reverts to the monotonous "NN".
"These deaths are not isolated incidents," the document points out. "They are symptomatic of policies that no longer see the humanity of those fleeing their homeland, but prefer to see them as numbers or, worse, as a natural disaster, 'a flood'.
"By making legal immigration and asylum nearly impossible, these policies lead to the death of refugees, who [flee] because of war, persecution . . . poverty or natural disasters."
A spokesperson for United said: "Dense borders are a political illusion. Europe can no longer ignore the circle of desperation around its borders. The more Europe tries to keep migrants out of its societies and economies, the higher the risks refugees will take to come to Europe."
