[Qgis-user] Query re: Area measures

[Wenban-Smith]

My QGIS project uses a .shp file of 179 districts in Tanzania. I wish to know the area of each district in sq km but the Geometry-$area function (in the field calculator of the Attributes table) only reports areas in decimal degrees (whereas the individual area measuring tool from the toolbar reports sq km but is tedious to use and not precise). It appears looking under Settings/Project Properties [General tab] that it is possible to convert to meters only when CRS transformation is disabled but there is no guidance how to do this (nor why this should be necessary). I have tried converting the CRS from Arc 1960 to one the UTM ones but this did not help.

Grateful for any advice more experienced users can offer.

Hugh W-S
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