Finding geospatial data on your computer

This recipe shows you how to use the QGIS browser to locate and open spatial data.

Getting ready

Before you start working, make sure that you have copied the sample dataset to your filesystem and you have it located.

How to do it…

There are several ways of locating and opening a data file to open it in QGIS, but the most convenient of these is the QGIS browser:

  1. To enable this, go to the View | Panels menu and enable the Browser checkbox in it. The browser will be shown by default in the left-hand side of the QGIS window, as shown in the following screenshot:
    How to do it…

    Browser contains a tree with all the available sources ...

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