That’s not a PTS Utility error message. Where is PTS Charts in your interface? Do you see the Box and Whisker dialog at all?

Instead of clogging this blog post, why not email your description to me at jonxlmvp (at) peltiertech (dot) com. If you could take a screen shot of the error message, please include it in the email, and if the data isn’t sensitive, please include that as well.

The data point misalignment error in the Box Plot utility arises because Excel 2007 treats combination line-xy charts differently than previous versions; I suspect this is due to an oversight. In prior versions of Excel, if you had a chart with a category axis (line, area, column) and added an XY series, the points of the XY series were plotted according to a numbering scheme where 1=first category, 2=second category, etc. An x value of 1 would result in a point over the first category, an x value of 2.5 would result in a point midway between the second and third categories. This is extremely useful in many applications:

1. I use it to provide open and close tick marks on an OHLC stock plot: the Line series give High and Low values for the Hi-Lo lines, while the XY series give Open and Close values to which I apply short negative and positive X error bars for the ticks.

2. It’s how you can plot multiple series on a Line chart’s nice date scale, and allow the series to use independent sets of dates: the first series is the line series to provide the scale, the others are XY series. (Otherwise, in a line chart, all series share the X values of the first series, no matter what you might enter as the X values).

3. It makes adding an index series to a regular Excel stock chart, without the index interfering with the high-low lines or the up-down bars.

4. etc. etc.

In Excel 2007, you need to have an explicit secondary axis for the XY chart, and scale that axis according to how you want it to align with the primary category axis. The chart programmers on Excel 2007 didn’t envision this sharing of axes between line and XY series, although it has existed since at least Excel 97 and I suspect earlier; I use it in at least hundreds of charts a year.