Can't find the "pivotSource" and "pivotOptions" description in the http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/drawing/2012/chart schema

Question

Hello Microsoft Team!

I have a problem with an XML schema, I can't find anywhere in the schema the following XML tags: "pivotSource" and "pivotOptions", and their further description. I tried here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/office_standards/ms-odrawxml/1c52d959-25d3-4556-9381-cc86c1221029

but without success, I can find only this part:

Can you please help me where can I find the rest of the "pivotSource" and "pivotOptions" decription?

I have the following part in the chart.xml file:

In which we have the "pivotSource", and its children: "name" and "fmtId", which cannot be recognized by the schema file from here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/office_standards/ms-odrawxml/1c52d959-25d3-4556-9381-cc86c1221029. Nor the "pivotOptions" and its children.

Can you please help me?

Thank you in advance!

Best regards,

Varga Matild

Answer 1

AI generated content. This answer was created with AI from ChatGPT

The issue you're facing stems from the fact that the pivotSource and pivotOptions elements, while used in Office Open XML files, are not part of the main schema at:

http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/drawing/2012/chart

What's Going On?

You're encountering custom Microsoft Office extensions—proprietary additions to the Open XML standard. These elements (pivotSource, pivotOptions, and pivotOptions16) are often defined in non-public or partially documented schemas, and unfortunately, not all of them are available in the Open Specifications documentation.

What You Can Do

1. Search Microsoft Open Specifications: You already tried: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/office_standards/ms-odrawxml/ Unfortunately, not all elements used in Office-generated files are documented there.

Use Office2013+ Schema Files: These might live under internal namespaces or come from the Office 2013+ additions. The full schema may only be available via Office schema downloads provided by Microsoft:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30425 (Office 2013 schema)

  [https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=49030](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=49030) (Office 2016 schema)

  
  **Use Tools like Open XML SDK Reflector**: The [Open XML SDK Productivity Tool](https://github.com/OfficeDev/Open-XML-SDK) can inspect and decompile document parts to show how Office applications interpret these unknown tags.

  
  **Reverse Engineer from Examples**: Since Office apps can read these tags just fine, sometimes your best bet is to inspect working `.xlsx` files and reverse-engineer how these tags are used.
```---
Specific Notes

From your XML snippet:


```xml
<cl5:pivotSource>
  <cl5:name>[0. VLR Data Tool.xlsx]PivotChartTable2</cl5:name>
  <cl5:fmtId val="0"/>
</cl5:pivotSource>

The namespace cl5 corresponds to:

xmlns:cl5="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/drawing/2012/chart"

But this namespace doesn't publicly define pivotSource or pivotOptions. These are likely private Microsoft extensions, used internally by Excel.

---

Recommendation

If you need to work with these elements programmatically, the most robust approach is:

Use Open XML SDK to interact with them.

Treat these elements as opaque/custom XML unless you're targeting a very specific scenario (e.g., modifying known fields in Excel).

Document and preserve working examples, as there's no guarantee of forward compatibility.

Would you like help inspecting a .xlsx file with these elements using code or Open XML SDK?