Challenge 3: Avoiding the Total Row in a Chart Selection — Solution Walkthrough

What goes wrong if the Total Row is included:

The Total Row's value for each region column (or an overall grand
total, depending on how it's configured) is a SUM of everything above
it — meaning it will typically be as large as, or larger than, every
individual region's own quarterly figure combined. If that row is
included in the chart's data selection, it gets drawn as its own bar
(or slice) directly alongside the individual regions — a bar
representing "all regions added together" sitting next to bars
representing single regions. That combined-total bar visually
dwarfs every genuine per-region bar, compressing all the actual
region-to-region comparisons into a small fraction of the chart's
vertical scale and making the real differences between regions much
harder to read accurately.

The correct selection to make instead:

Select only the header row and the individual data rows for each
region — deliberately stopping the selection one row above the Total
Row, so the chart's data range never includes it at all. If the
table is later resorted or has new regions added, the individual-row
selection (or, better, a chart built from structured references
inside the Table itself) still shouldn't include the Total Row, since
that row's position always stays at the very bottom of the table
regardless of how many data rows exist above it.

Notes:
- This is precisely why this chapter's warning box calls this out as
  a distinct mistake from simply "picking the wrong chart type" —
  the chart type could be exactly right (a column chart for
  comparing regions) and the chart would still be misleading, purely
  because of which ROWS were included in the selection.
- A quick sanity check after building any chart: does the number of
  bars/slices match the number of actual categories you meant to
  compare? An extra, unusually large bar is a strong sign a totals
  row snuck into the selection.