[Qgis-user] Editing shapefile attributes in QGIS

[Stefan Keller]

I would strongly recommend to avoid Shapefiles since it's a format
from grandfathers days (e.g. with obscure short field name length).
You can save the Shapefile in Spatialite (and soon as GeoPackage)
format which is based on a single SQLite file.
Then, you can edit this (besides inside QGIS DB Manager) also e.g.
with admin tools like "DB Browser for SQLite" [1].

Yours, S.


[1] http://sourceforge.net/projects/sqlitebrowser/


2014-12-19 18:51 GMT+01:00 Alex Mandel <tech_dev at wildintellect.com>:
> Actually the issue is that Excel 2007 and later no longer allow Saving
> DBF without add-ons (3rd party). Only LibreOffice or OpenOffice still
> support that.
>
> So yes if you can use Table Manager and built in tools to QGIS that
> would provide less headache long term, manually adding columns to dbf is
> a little tricky sometimes.
>
> Alternately you can import an xls table and join it to an existing
> shapefile.
>
> Enjoy,
> Alex
>
> On 12/18/2014 12:14 PM, Basques, Bob (CI-StPaul) wrote:
>> Paulo,
>>
>> Well my first answer would be to suggest you simply open the DBF file up in Excel and edit it directly, as long as you leave the ID columns (to associate the attributes with the Geometries) alone you can do all that you describe.  But Excel no longer opens DBF files by default (or does it now, again?).  So, you should use OpenOffice or LibreOffice to open them, and then do the same thing in there.
>>
>> Bobb
>>
>>
>>
>> From: qgis-user-bounces at lists.osgeo.org [mailto:qgis-user-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Paulo van Breugel
>> Sent: Thursday, December 18, 2014 2:09 PM
>> To: David Bradley; QGIS user email list
>> Subject: Re: [Qgis-user] Editing shapefile attributes in QGIS
>>
>> You can do a lot with the Table manager (you can find and install this plugin via the plugin manager: menu --> plugins --> manage and install plugins).
>> If that is not enough, you can of course always open the dbf file. I would recommend using LibreOffice/OpenOffice instead of excel as in my experience at least Excel can sometimes mess up the dbf file.
>>
>> Paulo
>>
>> On 18 December 2014 20:39:33 CET, David Bradley <dododave at gmail.com<mailto:dododave at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>> Can someone point me in the direction of a better way to edit the data in a shapefile?
>>
>> Basically I want to export what is already in there to Excel, edit it, and then re-import it. The editing I need to do is to move a few cells into another column, add several columns, and remove many other seemingly superfluous columns.
>>
>> Thanks for any suggestions!
>> David
>>
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