Top Data & Analytics Skills

About Data & Analytics

The best agent skills for data and analytics in 2026 are Anthropic's official `xlsx` Skill for spreadsheet work — preserving formulas, charts, and conditional formatting that pandas drops — and the BI dashboard Skills (Looker, Metabase, Hex) for turning live data into published reports. Data & analytics Skills give agents the chops to handle the full data-team workflow — from messy CSV cleanup to dashboard authoring to scientific dataset analysis. The category covers BI dashboard generation (Looker, Metabase, Hex), structured extraction from PDFs and scraped pages, D3 visualization patterns, jupyter notebook authoring, and ETL Skills that wire data sources together.

Common workflows include cleaning malformed spreadsheets into proper datasets, generating SQL for a question, building a chart from a dataset, exploratory analysis in a notebook, extracting tables from PDFs for analysis, and authoring repeatable data pipelines. Several Skills pair with Supermetrics, Ahrefs, Datadog, or other analytics MCP servers so the agent has live data access. The xlsx Skill — Anthropic-authored — anchors the spreadsheet half of this category and frequently shows up in non-analytics workflows too.

Data scientists, analytics engineers, BI leads, and product managers running their own analyses use these. Composite scoring weights install count (xlsx and the BI Skills dominate), provenance (Anthropic, well-known data orgs), and how well the Skill handles the messy real-world cases: misplaced headers, encoding issues, mixed types, merged cells.