Ternary Plot Maker

What a Ternary Plot Shows

A ternary plot, also called a ternary diagram or triangular graph, shows how three components share a whole: each point inside an equilateral triangle is one mixture, sample or vote whose three percentages add up to 100. Each corner is 100 % of one component and the opposite edge is 0 % of it, so a point near a corner is dominated by that component and a point in the middle is an even three-way split. Because only two of the three values are free, three-variable data fits on a flat page with nothing hidden.

SlideModel built this maker for the moment that data has to go on a slide. Most makers stop at a flat image in a default style; this one draws on a 16:9 canvas so the preview is the slide you get, lets you place points by clicking as well as by pasting, and with Pro hands back real PowerPoint shapes.

How to Read a Ternary Diagram

To read a ternary diagram, find the corner that is 100 % of the component you want, then follow the gridlines that run parallel to the edge opposite that corner.

1. Find the 100 % corner for the component you are reading. Sand, say, at the bottom-left.
2. Follow the gridline through your point that runs parallel to the edge opposite that corner, out to the tick labels on the edge.
3. Read the value where the gridline meets the scale.
4. Repeat for the other two components.

If your three readings do not add up to 100 %, you have followed the wrong family of gridlines. That one check catches almost every mistake, and it is why the tick marks on this chart are drawn as short slanted continuations of their own gridlines: the slant tells you which lines a number belongs to. Hovering any point shows all three values, so you can confirm a reading while you learn.

How to Build the Chart

1. Bring your data in. Paste a block from Excel, Google Sheets or a CSV with one row per point and three value columns, or type rows straight into the table. A text column before the numbers becomes the label, a text column after them becomes the group. Rows that don't add up to 100 are scaled for you.
2. Or click inside the triangle. Click anywhere inside the triangle to add a point at that composition, then drag it to adjust. Hold Shift to snap to the grid. This is the fastest way to sketch a scenario live in a meeting.
3. Name the three components. The three column headers are the corner labels: Sand, Silt and Clay, or Stocks, Bonds and Cash. Fill the Group column to colour points by category and get a legend, or pick a classification overlay — soil texture classes, sediment classes or the QAPF plutonic fields — to draw the standard fields behind the points and name each sample's class in the table.
4. Style it for your deck. Choose a palette and background, set the grid to 5, 10, 20 or 25 %, pick whether the scales read clockwise or counter-clockwise to match the convention your field uses, and spotlight the one point the slide is about.
5. Download. Take a crisp PNG for free. With Pro, download a vector SVG or use Insert into slide for a PowerPoint file where every point, gridline and label is an editable shape.

Where Ternary Plots Are Used

Ternary plots are used wherever three parts make up a whole: soil texture (sand, silt and clay), igneous rock classification (quartz, alkali feldspar and plagioclase), three-component phase and flammability diagrams in chemistry, genotype frequencies in population genetics, and three-way vote, market or portfolio shares in business.

Field	Diagram	The three components
Soil science, agronomy	Soil texture triangle	Sand · silt · clay
Petrology	QAPF diagram	Quartz · alkali feldspar · plagioclase
Sedimentology	Sediment classification diagram	Sand · silt · clay
Chemistry, materials	Ternary phase diagram	Three mixture components
Process safety	Flammability diagram	Fuel · oxygen · inert gas
Population genetics	Genotype frequency diagram	AA · Aa · aa
Politics, journalism	Three-way election chart	Vote share per candidate
Finance, marketing	Asset allocation or market share triangle	Stocks · bonds · cash, or three competitors

The first three rows are built in as classification overlays: switch one on and the soil texture classes, the sediment classes or the QAPF plutonic fields are drawn behind your points, and the table names the class each sample falls in. The starter datasets cover the most common cases — a revenue mix by market, soil samples, sediment cores, rock samples, election districts and a portfolio mix — so you can see how the compositional data of your own field reads before you paste it in.

Ternary Plots in Excel and PowerPoint

Excel and PowerPoint have no ternary chart type. The usual workaround is to convert each row to x-y coordinates by hand and overlay a drawn triangle on a scatter chart. That works once and breaks the moment the data changes, and the result is still a picture that nobody else on the team can edit.

This maker does the conversion for you: paste the three columns, and the triangle, gridlines, scales and points are drawn on a slide-sized canvas immediately. With Pro, Insert into slide writes the plot back as native PowerPoint shapes, so the chart lives in the deck as an object, not a screenshot.

Built for Slides

The canvas is a fixed 16:9 frame, so what you see is what you paste — a triangle that fits the slide with room for the scales, not a square export you have to crop. Rows that do not sum to 100 are scaled rather than rejected, because lab data and vote counts rarely sum exactly and the tool exists to plot them, not to lecture; the footer reports how many were scaled so nothing is silent. Points can be added by clicking because explaining a mixture live — "what if we moved this to 60 % bonds?" — is half of what this chart is for.

Everything on a ternary plot is a straight line, a circle or a text box. That is why the PowerPoint export is exact rather than an approximation: every gridline is a real line, every point a real circle, every label a real text box, and all of it recolours and restyles natively in PowerPoint. Pair the chart with a SlideModel template and the slide is done.