Compufers & Geosciences Vol. 22, No. 6, pp.

697699, 1996
Pergamon Cmvrieht (%1 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd
Printed’& drea;Britain. All rights reserved
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SHORT NOTE
TERNPLOT: AN EXCEL SPREADSHEET FOR TERNARY DIAGRAMS

DANIEL MARSHALL
Departmentof Earth Sciences,
CarletonUniversity,Ottawa,KlS 5B6 Canada
(email:marshall@ccs.carleton.ca)

(Received 9 September 1995; revised 16 November 1993

INTRODUCTION not necessaryto changeany of the other valuesshown

Ternary diagramsare used almost exclusively by in Figure 1.
earth scientistsand unfortunately have not been
incorporatedinto mostof the commerciallyavailable DATA
graphing softwarepackagesfor IBM PCsand com-
patibles.Somepackagesare available,suchas Igpet Raw data can be enteredinto columnsRD start-
(Carr, 1995) Petro-talc plot (Sidder, 1994) Newpet ing at row 17 (Fig. 2). Thesethree rows correspond
(Clarke and others, 1994),Minpet (Richard, 1992), to the A-C apicesshownin Figure 3. Data can be
and Triplot (Baedkeand Thompson,1993),but these imported from the clipboard, imported from an
programs have limited scaling capabilities for the ASCII file, or entered from the keyboard up to a
lengthsof the axesand placementof tick marks.As maximum of 300 points. Samplenumbers can be
most earth scientistsare familiar with one of the enteredin column A (Fig. 2). The normalized data
commerciallyavailable spreadsheet programs,Tern- are calculated from the unnormalized values
Plot wascreatedin Excel 4.0. TernPlot offersthe user (columnsED) and stored in columnsH-J (Fig. 2).
scaleableaxes,tick-mark increment,and length selec- The x and y coordinate values used for plotting
tion, anddiagramscan be output directly to a printer are calculated in columnsF and G. To reduce the
or transferredto drawing programsvia the Windows initial size of the spreadsheetonly, the first three
Clipboard. With the aid of the help facility within rows (17-19) have the necessaryformulae for the
Excel, a new user can quickly becomefamiliar with normalization and x,y coordinate calculations.As
the rudimentary commandsnecessaryfor moving the user adds more points to the spreadsheet,the
data, copying cells,and selectingsymbol types. formulae in cells F19-J19 shouldbe copied to cells
The minimum hardware and software require- Fxx-Jxx, wherexx correspondsto the row number
mentsare an IBM PC compatiblewith Windowsand of any row containing unnormalizeddata. The user
Excel 4.0 (or 5.0), and a Windows 3.1 compatible shouldnot deleteany columnsor rowsof data asthe
printer. The program is available from the anony- calculations for the axes (Figs. 1 and 2) and tick
mousFTP site IAMG.ORG. marks (columnsAN-AR) are performed in other
areasof the spreadsheet and somecellscrucial to the
construction of the ternary diagram may be deleted
SETUP
inadvertently.
The use of particular printers, Windows installa- Symbol shapesare limited to those available in
tions, and Excel versionsoccasionallyresult in small Excel. Individual symbolsare assignedto each data
differencesin the lengthof the ternary axes.To ensure seriesasdefinedin the Excel chart menu.In order to
that the default settingsare consistentwith your selectdifferent symbols,the usermustdefinedifferent
hardware,it is advisableto copy the file ternplotxls seriesfrom the Chart, Edit seriesmenusin Excel.
to your hard disk and print out a ternary diagramon The useris referredto the Excel helpmenuor Excel
your printer. If the axeson the printout havedifferent documentation for further information on editing
lengths,change the B-C axis length adjustmentin seriesand selectingsymbol types.
cell F341 (Fig. l), which resultsin an increaseor
decreasein the length of th . B-C axis relative to the SCALING OF AXES AND TICK MARKS
lengthsof the A-B and A- (2 axes.A value of 75.00
producesaxesof equal length for a wide variety of Axes can be scaledby changing the modifiable
printers with Excel version 4.0. A value of 81 pro- plotting parametersfor the A and B scales(Fig. 2).
ducesaxesof similarlengthsin Excel version5. It is The minimumandmaximumscalefor A (cellsC9 and

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