The Tuesday that keeps happening
There is a report you produce every month, and every month it takes longer than it should, because every month you start from nothing. You re-remember which columns matter. You re-invent the same clean-up. You rebuild the same chart, slightly differently, and you spend the last twenty minutes wondering whether the total looks right.
The skills in the previous five lessons only become an hour a month if you stop improvising them. What follows is the routine, in order, with the prompts attached. Run it three times and it stops feeling like a checklist and starts feeling like how you work.
In plain English
- Workflow:
- A fixed order of steps you follow every time, so you stop deciding what to do next.
- Prompt pack:
- Your saved, reusable prompts with the specifics blanked out, ready to fill in.
- Source of truth:
- The system whose numbers everyone agrees are the real ones. Your control total lives there.
- Readme tab:
- An extra sheet in your workbook explaining where the data came from and what was excluded.
The seven steps
One, save the original. Duplicate the export, name the copy Working, and never type in the original again.
Two, describe your columns. One line naming each column, its letter and the row range. You will paste this into every prompt that follows, so writing it once saves you five times.
Three, count your rows. Write the number down. This is your tripwire for the rest of the session.
Four, clean in helper columns. Spaces, capitalisation, dates, duplicates. Flag before you delete anything, and paste values only when you are satisfied.
Five, ask one real question. A metric, a comparison and the decision it feeds. Not what is interesting here.
Six, check the answer. Sample five rows by hand, compare against a control total, recount your rows.
Seven, write the finding, then draw the chart. The sentence first. The chart exists to make that sentence obvious in ten seconds.
Checkpoint
Save the original, describe your columns, count the rows, clean in helpers, ask one real question, check the answer, write the finding before the chart.
Build the artifact outside this site
LearnAI has no accounts and stores nothing you type. That is deliberate, and it means the useful thing you make today has to live somewhere you own: a note in your phone, a text file on your desktop, a pinned message to yourself, or best of all a Readme tab inside the workbook you use every month.
Copy the block below into that place now, while it is in front of you, and fill in the square brackets with your actual columns and your actual source system.
MY MONTHLY DATA ROUTINE
Source: [where the export comes from]
Control total to check against: [which system, which number]
Columns: A is [ ], B is [ ], C is [ ], D is [ ]
Usual row count: about [ ]
BEFORE
[ ] Duplicated the export, working on the copy
[ ] Row count written down: ______
[ ] Date range confirmed: ______ to ______
CLEAN
[ ] TRIM and capitalisation done in helper columns
[ ] Dates all real dates, ambiguous ones checked at source
[ ] Duplicates flagged and read, not auto-deleted
[ ] Row count after cleaning: ______ (explain any change)
ANALYSE
[ ] The one question I am answering: ______
[ ] Comparison period or baseline: ______
[ ] Outliers listed and looked at, not removed
CHECK
[ ] Five rows recomputed by hand
[ ] Total compared against the control total, gap explained
[ ] Final row count: ______
SHARE
[ ] Chart title states the finding, not the topic
[ ] Assumptions line written: date range, exclusions, row count
[ ] No number in here that I have not run or reconciled myself
Your prompt pack
Three prompts cover most of a monthly report. Save these with your checklist and fill in the brackets each time.
CONTEXT BLOCK (paste at the top of every prompt)
I am using [Excel / Google Sheets]. Headers in row 1.
Columns: A is [ ], B is [ ], C is [ ], D is [ ].
Data runs from row 2 to row [ ]. This is a [monthly] export from [system].
CLEAN
Column [B] has [inconsistent capitalisation and extra spaces].
Give me a helper column formula that fixes it without touching the original,
and tell me what the formula will get wrong so I can check those rows.
FORMULA
I want [what should happen, in plain words], in cell [G2].
Give me one formula and explain each part in one line.
Do not calculate any totals yourself. I will run the formula.
ANALYSE
[Metric] moved from [X] to [Y] between [period A] and [period B].
Break that change down by [region / product / channel], ranked by
how much of the total change each accounts for, in amount and percentage.
Stop when you have explained 80 percent of the movement.
CHECK
Before any final number: list which rows you include and exclude and why,
show a worked example on the first three rows, then give me the formula.
My control total from [system] is [ ]. If my answer differs, list the most
likely causes of a gap that size and exactly what to check for each one.
CHART
I want the reader to conclude: [the sentence].
Audience is [who], they will look for [10] seconds.
Recommend one chart type, the sort order, what goes on each axis,
and a title that states the finding. Keep it readable in black and white.
โ Weak prompt
Prompt
Here is this month's export, can you do the monthly report.
Output
A summary of the data with some totals, a few observations, and a chart suggestion.
No columns, no control total, no question, no checks. You will spend longer verifying it than you would have spent doing it.
โ Good prompt
Prompt
Context block plus columns and row range, then: revenue fell from 431,004 to 396,120 between April and May. Break the fall down by region, ranked, in amount and share. Give me the formula rather than the total. My control total from the finance system is 396,120.
Output
A ranked breakdown, a formula you can run, and a note about which rows were excluded.
Same routine every month, so the prompt is mostly pre-written. You are filling in four numbers, not starting from nothing.
Add a Readme tab to the workbook itself, holding the source, the date range, the exclusions and the row count. Six months from now, when somebody asks how this figure was built, that tab is the difference between a ten-second answer and a lost afternoon.
The step people drop first when they are busy is the check. It is also the only step whose absence you cannot see in the finished report. Protect it. Two minutes of sample checking is cheaper than one wrong number in front of your board.
What you can do now
You can ask for a formula by describing the goal instead of hunting for the function. You can take a genuinely horrible export and make it trustworthy. You can ask a question that gets a real answer rather than four paragraphs of hedging. You can build a chart that makes its point before anyone reads the axis labels. And you can tell the difference between a number that is right and a number that merely sounds right, which is a rarer skill in most offices than it should be.
That is the Data Whisperer badge, and it is a fair description of what you now do: you talk to your spreadsheet in plain English, and you do not believe it until it proves itself.
Take the ugliest export on your computer right now and run the seven steps on it once, end to end. The first run is slow. The third one takes twenty minutes and feels like cheating.
๐ Quiz
Question 1 of 4Where should your checklist and prompt pack actually live?