A simple and versatile approach to incorporating basic optical microscopy in the undergraduate instrumental analysis laboratory is described. Attaching a miniature CCD spectrometer to the video port of a standard compound microscope yields a visible microspectrophotometer suitable for student investigations of fundamental spectrometry concepts, basic principles of optical microscopy, and some interesting phenomena unique to spectral measurements performed at the microscale. Results from several such investigations and ideas for additional applications are presented. (Contains 5 figures.)