Practical GIS

Opening tabular layers

The vector layers we opened so far were dedicated vector data exchange formats; therefore, they had every information coded in them needed for QGIS to open them. There are some cases when we get some data in a tabular format, like in a spreadsheet. These data usually contain points as coordinates in columns and attributes in other columns. They do not store any metadata about the vectors, which we have to gather from readme files, or the team members producing the data.

QGIS can handle one tabular format--CSV (Comma Separated Values), which is an ASCII file format, a simple text file containing tabular data. Every row is in a new line, while fields are separated with an arbitrary field separator character (the default ...