Why is this PivotItem.Visible call throwing a TypeMismatch error?

Question

This is baffling us. I have a standard pivot table with a report filter on it that allows multiple selection of items. I can get the selected items in the report filter with:

Answer 1

After researching this for a bit, everything I have found is pointing at this being a bug in the VBA library code. However, I did seem to (accidently) stumble across a method that appears to fix the error, that I did not see mentioned in any other threads / forums about this error.

The pivot table I was working with basically looked like this:

and I was trying to have a macro hide the highlighted sections. Note that the error was only being thrown for the first highlighted section, which contained blank dates / data.

I was using this code:

Function RemovePivotTableBlanks(ByRef pt As PivotTable, ByVal field As String)
    Dim pi As PivotItem

    For Each pi In pt.PivotFields(field).PivotItems
        If Left(pi.Value, 1) = "<" Or Left(pi.Value, 1) = ">" Or pi.Value = "(blank)" Then

            'this throws an error, but only for the first PivotItem
            If pi.Visible = True Then
                pi.Visible = False
            End If
        End If
    Next pi
End Function

Also note that the .Visible property still showed the correct value in the Locals window.

For some reason, if I assigned the .Value to a string, and back to the PivotItem object, the error went away:

Function RemovePivotTableBlanks(ByRef pt As PivotTable, ByVal field As String)
Application.ScreenUpdating = False
Application.EnableEvents = False
    Dim pi As PivotItem
    Dim str As String

    For Each pi In pt.PivotFields(field).PivotItems
        If Left(pi.Value, 1) = "<" Or Left(pi.Value, 1) = ">" Or pi.Value = "(blank)" Then

            str = pi.Value
            pi.Value = str

            'no error for the first PivotItem anymore
            If pi.Visible = True Then
                pi.Visible = False
            End If
        End If
    Next pi
Application.EnableEvents = True
Application.ScreenUpdating = True
End Function