Microsoft Chart

The first software sold under the name Microsoft Chart was an attempt from Microsoft to compete with the successful Lotus 123 by adding a companion to Microsoft Multiplan, the company's spreadsheet in the early 1980s.

Ms/Chart shared with Multiplan the box design and the two lines menu at the bottom of the screen, and could import Multiplan data. The simple graphs (pies, bars, lines) were drawn on the screen by switching the display mode of the IBM PC Compatibles to graphics (which was not available to entry level models), or could be printed on some dot matrix devices.

The main drawback of the Microsoft solution at this time was the necessity to quit the spreadsheet and then load Ms/Chart to compose and draw a graph, as MS/DOS was not a multitasking operating system. Thus, Lotus 123 maintained its market share until the release of Excel by Microsoft.

Since the early 1990s, the name Microsoft Chart is sometimes used as a synonym for the component Microsoft Graph.