Yes…mistakes are inevitable, and I get not expecting or demanding perfection. But the subtext here is that this is unlikely to be a mistake, and much more likely to be fraud.

There are incentives for these spreadsheets having the values that they do, and also there is no conceivable way that the values are correct, and on top of that, the most likely ways to get these values are to copy and paste large amounts of numbers, and even perturb some of them manually.

If you see this in accounting,(where there are also mistakes), it’s definitely fraud. (Awww man - we accidentally inflated our revenue and profit to meet expectations by accidentally duplicating numerous revenue lines and no one internally caught it! Dang interns!) If you see it in science, you ask the authors about it and they shrug and mumble a semi plausible explanation if you’re lucky? I can totally imagine a lab tech or grad student making a large copy paste mistake. I can’t imagine them making a series of them in such a way that it bolsters or proves the author’s claim AND goes completely undetected by everyone involved.

well, in that case, its bad. Obviously.