Hi Mike, Three questions from someone newish to qgis: > > 1. how do you put point data on a map in qgis. This seems to be the > simplest thing to do in most other gis systems but the most difficult in > qgis or have I completely missed something. E.g. I have a file of lat long > coordinates or ordnance survey coordinates in an excel file and simply want > to plot them out, how do I do that? I have actually done it but only via > another gis (then saving and replotting the resulting vector format file in > qgis) or via a .kml file again generated elsewhere. > > If you have the points in an excel file, you can simply save this as a csv, and open this directly in QGIS. Have a look at the manual [1], which gives you a nice walk-through of everything you need to do to get things going. In particular, have a look at section 12.3 (Delimited Text Plugin).
> > 1. > 2. how to get hold of free basemap outline data e.g. countries of the > world. I have tried very many different sources and still not found a nice > set of data that is relatively easy to use. > > In this case, you should be looking for a shapefile, and there are many nice ones out there via Google, example: http://www.bluemarblegeo.com/products/worldmapdata.php?op=download > > 1. > 2. how to display and use maps that are not centred on the prime > meridian and go past 180 degrees e.g. maps of Russia? > > For this, you will want to find out the standard projections for Russian data. Certainly a shapefile of the world will display data over Russia, but you will need to find out what the relevant projections are before you do any real work or mapping. > > 1. > > This is for a project to plot records of species in Russia i.e. plot the > location of a sighting, seems straightforward enough but actually turns out > to be very difficult. > QGIS behaves fairly similarly to most other GIS packages, with perhaps a bit more emphasis on 'plugins' (which is what you need to get csv files working). Once you get the right data, and understand a bit about the projection(s) that you need to be working in, things will go quite smoothly. For a nice intro to GIS, and some excellent information on projections and how to work with them in QGIS, have at "A Gentle GIS Introduction", also on the manual page [1]. [1] **http://www.qgis.org/en/documentation/manuals.html Regards, Carson -- Carson Farmer National Centre for Geocomputation John Hume Building, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Maynooth, Co. Kildare, Ireland. www.carsonfarmer.com
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