Talk:Microsoft Office shared tools/Microsoft Graph

Microsoft Graph (also known as Microsoft Chart) is an OLE application that is deployed by a number of the Microsoft Office programs such as Excel and Access to create charts and graphs. The program can also be hosted as an OLE application object in Visual Basic. Microsoft Graph supports many different types of charts, however, it is a legacy application and the charts produced are not modern-looking and polished. Office 2003 was the last version to use Microsoft Graph for hosting charts inside Office applications as OLE objects. Office 2007, specifically, Excel 2007 includes a new integrated high-quality charting engine and the charts created are native to the applications. The new engine supports advanced formatting, including 3D rendering, transparencies and shadows. Chart layouts can also be customized to highlight various trends in the data. Microsoft Graph still exists for compatibility reasons, but the entry points are removed.

History

The first software sold, under the name Microsoft Chart, was an attempt from Microsoft to compete with the successful Lotus 1-2-3 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 1-2-3 maintained its market share until the release of Excel by Microsoft.

In the early 1990s, Microsoft Chart was renamed to Microsoft Graph.

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