ERR: No Error when values argument in pivot_table is not in df.columns

[cdemulde]

Code Sample

import pandas as pd

test = pd.DataFrame({'Date':pd.date_range(pd.datetime.today(), periods=20,freq='M').tolist(),
'occurrenceID':range(0,20)})

test['year'] = test.set_index('eventDate').index.year
test['month'] = test.set_index('eventDate').index.month

heatmap_prep = test.reset_index().pivot_table(index='year',columns='month',values='occurenceID',aggfunc='count')

Problem description

The above code gives no error, while 'occurenceID' is not a dataframe column (as there is a typo, needs to be 'occurrenceID', with two r's). It just produces a dataframe with only an index. Maybe a KeyError should be thrown?

Output of pd.show_versions()

INSTALLED VERSIONS ------------------ commit: None python: 3.5.2.final.0 python-bits: 64 OS: Darwin OS-release: 14.5.0 machine: x86_64 processor: i386 byteorder: little LC_ALL: en_US.UTF-8 LANG: None LOCALE: en_US.UTF-8

pandas: 0.19.1
nose: None
pip: 9.0.1
setuptools: 32.1.0.post20161217
Cython: None
numpy: 1.11.2
scipy: 0.18.1
statsmodels: 0.6.1
xarray: None
IPython: 5.1.0
sphinx: None
patsy: 0.4.1
dateutil: 2.6.0
pytz: 2016.10
blosc: None
bottleneck: None
tables: None
numexpr: None
matplotlib: 1.5.3
openpyxl: None
xlrd: 1.0.0
xlwt: None
xlsxwriter: None
lxml: None
bs4: None
html5lib: None
httplib2: None
apiclient: None
sqlalchemy: None
pymysql: None
psycopg2: None
jinja2: 2.8
boto: None
pandas_datareader: None

[jreback]

yep, looks like a bug. These should be validated and a KeyError if not found (with a helpful message, iow which arg its coming from).

[Dr-Irv]

Looks like the KeyError is generated for when the index and columns arguments have a bad name. So it is only for values that there is an issue.