Challenge 3: A Text-Stored Sales Column Defaulting to Count — Solution Walkthrough

What's actually wrong:

The Sales column was imported or entered as TEXT rather than genuine
numbers — it may visually look identical to real numbers in the cells,
but Calc's Pivot Table treats a text-typed column differently from a
numeric one when it's dropped into Data Fields. Rather than defaulting
to Sum (the default for genuinely numeric data), it defaults to Count
— literally counting how many entries exist, not adding up any values
— which is exactly why the resulting numbers look like row counts
rather than dollar totals.

The fix:

Convert the Sales column to genuine numbers (e.g. select the column,
use Data > Text to Columns with default settings to force a real
numeric conversion, or multiply by 1 in a helper column), then rebuild
or refresh the Pivot Table so it re-reads the now-genuinely-numeric
column and defaults to Sum correctly.

The exact Excel Fundamentals chapter and concept this mirrors:

This is precisely Excel Fundamentals Chapter 9's own warning about a
numeric-looking field stored as text defaulting to Count instead of
Sum in a PivotTable's Values area — the identical underlying cause (a
column that looks numeric but isn't actually stored that way) produces
the identical symptom (Count instead of Sum) in both applications,
since both PivotTable/Pivot Table implementations rely on the same
distinction between genuinely numeric data and text that merely
resembles it.

WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER
------------------------------
This is a direct test of whether this chapter's own warning box was
actually understood as "the same underlying Excel gotcha, not a new
Calc-specific problem" — recognising the SAME root cause (text vs.
real numbers) behind an identical symptom across two different
applications is the actual point of this exercise, not just knowing
how to fix a text-formatted column in isolation.