How long visual models waited to become built-in chart types in Microsoft Excel.
Each bar spans from a chart type's first appearance to the moment it became a native Excel option.
But the gap has two halves. Before 1987, no such market existed: Excel had not shipped,
so that latency cannot be blamed on slow tooling.
After 1987, the tool was on the market and simply did not include the model yet.
That second span is the attributable lag, the real measure of how slowly the mainstream responds.
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Reading the bars. The hatched portion of each bar is the pre-1987 span, before Excel existed:
latency that cannot be attributed to the tool. The solid coral portion is the attributable lag, the years Excel was on
the market without offering the chart type. Chart types whose origin postdates 1987 are entirely coral. Dashed
bars are visual models still not built into Excel as of 2026, and their attributable lag is still growing.
Reading the marks. A solid dot marks the first appearance of the visual form. A hollow dot marks
when the name was coined. A short vertical tick marks the year the type entered Excel. Where a row begins with a
hollow dot, the form is older but not precisely datable, so the bar starts from the naming date and the true gap may be longer.
A caveat on "attributable." The 1987 line marks the birth of Excel, not of charting software in general.
Lotus 1-2-3 (1983) and earlier statistical packages could already draw several of these. So "attributable lag" means
attributable to Excel specifically (the mainstream standard), rather than to tooling as a whole.
Dates. Origin is the earliest documented appearance of the form, not always under its current name, and
not a claim that any one person "invented" it on that date. Excel is the first availability as a built-in type without
add-ins or workarounds. Confidence: high means a documented publication; medium means approximate or contested; low means
estimated or no single originator. Several "classic" types (radar, doughnut, surface, bubble, stock) entered Excel between
v3.0 (1990) and v97; exact versions are hard to source. Sankey is dated to Minard's 1869 flow map, though the name comes
from Riall Sankey (1898): exactly the kind of call open to revision.
This is a draft. Provisional dates, offered as a starting point for collective correction. Better sources welcome.
Roll over any row to reveal its dates and source notes; tap to keep it open.
EXCEL 1987
2026
Before Excel existed (not attributable)
Attributable lag (tool existed, did not include it)
Still absent in 2026
First appearance of the form
Name coined
Added to Excel
Number at right is the attributable lag, in years
Design: Paolo Ciuccarelli. Data compiled from historical sources, 2026. A living document; corrections and better sources welcome.