What’s inside

One SKILL.md (the playbook) + one starter template. A preview:

Stacked Column Chart

When to use

• You have numbers broken into parts — sales by channel per quarter, hours by project per week, budget by category per month — and a plain table hides which totals moved and why
• A slide, report, or post needs one chart that shows both the whole (how tall each column is) and the mix (what each column is made of) at a glance
• A spreadsheet's default stacked chart came out with a rainbow palette, a legend nobody can match to the segments, and labels too small to read
• You need to compare a handful of groups (say, 3–8 columns) across a handful of categories (say, 2–6 segments each) without resorting to a wall of pie charts
• An audience needs to see one story in the data — which segment grew, which shrank, which total changed — rather than raw numbers to decode themselves

Workflow

1. Shape the table (input: raw numbers → output: a tidy chart table)
   Lay the data out as one row per column and one column per segment, with every cell a number in the same unit — no blanks, no mixed units, no percentages mixed with counts. Put the segments in a meaningful order: largest-to-smallest, or the order the story needs (for example, a baseline segment at the bottom so its changes are easy to track). If a segment is zero or near-zero in every column, fold it into an "Other" row or drop it — a sliver nobody can see adds noise, not information. Check that every column's segments add up to its total before drawing anything.
2. Choose the segment order and palette (input: tidy table → output: segment order + colors)
   Stack the segments so the one the reader should compare first sits on the baseline (the bottom), because only the bottom segment shares a common starting line across columns. Order the rest by size or by story, and keep the same order in every column. Give each segment one flat, distinct color — silvers and greys with one accent color for the segment that matters most, never a rainbow — and make sure neighboring segments differ in lightness as well as hue so the chart survives greyscale printing and color-blind readers. Write the palette down as a legend table (segment → color) before drawing.

Template preview

Stacked Column Chart — Data + Layout Template

One dataset = one chart. Fill in the table first, then draw.

Chart title (states the finding): {e.g. Online overtook in-store in Q3}

Unit: {e.g. units sold} | Period: {e.g. Jan–Dec} | Source: {e.g. company records}

Tidy data table (one unit, no blanks, totals verified)

Check: [ ] every row's segments add up to its total [ ] segments in story order, same in every column

Segment order + palette (bottom segment first = the one to compare)

Palette check: [ ] flat colors, no rainbow [ ] neighbors differ in lightness [ ] survives greyscale

Layout

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