**Our Take: The chart you're chasing is a stacked bar with a target line, and the fact that you can't build it in any office product isn't your fault, it's a sign that those tools have stopped evolving.** You've described a perfectly reasonable visualization: a running total of donations climbing toward a goal, with clear milestones and a finish line. Your friend's sketch is intuitive because it mirrors how people actually think about progress, step by step, not in a spreadsheet grid. Yet the software you're using treats that logic as an edge case.
This is where the gap between what you need and what legacy tools deliver becomes painfully visible. Traditional spreadsheets were designed for static tables and simple bar charts. They assume your data lives in rigid columns and that your audience will accept whatever default formatting the software spits out. You are not asking for anything exotic. You want to tell a story: "We started here, we added this much, and here's how far we still have to go." That is a narrative, not a configuration problem. And the tools that claim to be "office products" still treat narrative as an afterthought.
What you're really up against is a limitation in how most spreadsheet applications handle data structure. To build your friend's chart, you would need to reorganize your table so that each donation increment becomes its own segment, then layer a secondary axis for the goal line, then manually fudge the formatting until it looks right. That process is fragile, time-consuming, and completely unnecessary. A modern AI-native spreadsheet would let you describe what you want in plain language, "show me cumulative donations climbing toward our target, with each month as a colored block", and generate the chart instantly. It would also let you update the data and have the visualization adjust itself, because the tool understands the relationship between your numbers and your goal, not just the coordinates of your cells.
We think this frustration is actually good news. It means you have already outgrown the software that treats data as something to be entered, not understood. The headache you feel is the sound of a tool hitting its ceiling. Your next step isn't to learn a workaround in PowerPoint or to spend an afternoon wrestling with pivot tables. It's to ask yourself: if the tool can't visualize progress toward a goal, how many other insights is it hiding? The solution is not a different chart type. It's a different way of working with data, one that starts with your question, not your column headers.