G'day CoVAX,

[Disclaimer: I'm not a regular user of Excel::Writer::XLSX — possibly last used a decade ago. Check any solutions by other monks; they may be much better.]

As your question revolved around colouring columns, I've just focussed on that aspect. I think the easiest thing would be to group the data by the required colours; that would avoid colouring individual cells. I believe the following does what you describe in terms of layout — I tested it by running this code as a standalone script and checking the pm_11166178.xlsx spreadsheet it created.

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use v5.24;
use warnings;

use Excel::Writer::XLSX;

my $workbook = Excel::Writer::XLSX::->new('pm_11166178.xlsx');
my $worksheet = $workbook->add_worksheet('C');

my @formats;

{
    no warnings 'qw';
    for my $colour (qw{#ED7D31 #4472C4 #00B050}) {
        push @formats, $workbook->add_format(bg_color => $colour);
    }
}

my @data = (
    {
        token => [[qw{a b c}],[1,2,3]],
        row => 1,
        col => 0,
        format => $formats[0],
    },
    {
        token => [[qw{d e f}],[4,5,6]],
        row => 1,
        col => 3,
        format => $formats[1],
    },
    {
        token => [[qw{x y z}],[24,25,26]],
        row => 1,
        col => 6,
        format => $formats[2],
    },
);

for my $datum (@data) {
    $worksheet->write_col(@$datum{qw{row col token format}});
}
[download]

A hint for future reference: providing some ASCII art to describe the wanted layout can be better than a prosaic description (a picture paints a thousand words :-)