[Qgis-us-user] Is QGIS right for me?

[Michele M Tobias]

Hi Ian,
I think QGIS will work very well for what you want to do.

Yes, you can import Excel files into QGIS. It’s more common for people to import tabular data as .csv files, but QGIS can read Excel too. If the data you’re downloading comes in .csv format, I’d recommend that you download that format instead (Excel can mangle data when it makes assumptions… particularly if it thinks anything is a date), but either format will work. Since your tabular data doesn’t have spatial information, you’ll need to join it to a vector file of the states. For this, I would recommend Natural Earth https://www.naturalearthdata.com/ This dataset is designed for cartography and should have the country identifiers you need to complete your join.  A Google search should turn up blog posts on how to import your tabular data and how to do the join.  My intro workshop is here: https://ucdavisdatalab.github.io/Intro-to-Desktop-GIS-with-QGIS/ It doesn’t cover joining data, but it does have some other skills you might need. And this is my cartography for academic figures workshop: https://github.com/MicheleTobias/Workshop-Cartography-Journal-Figures

There are ways to move directly from QGIS to an online interactive website. I’ll leave the specifics to the folks on the list who know more about this. (I build my own with Leaflet.)

I hope you give QGIS a try. I use it for my cartography work so I think you’ll find it to be more than sufficient.

Michele

Michele Tobias, PhD
Geospatial Data Specialist
DataLab: Data Science & Informatics
UC Davis Library

370 Shields Library
(530)752-7532
mmtobias at ucdavis.edu<mailto:mmtobias at ucdavis.edu>
ORCID: 0000-0002-2954-8710<https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2954-8710>

Pronouns: she, her, hers

From: Qgis-us-user <qgis-us-user-bounces at lists.osgeo.org> On Behalf Of Ian Feinhandler
Sent: Tuesday, June 20, 2023 8:05 AM
To: qgis-us-user at lists.osgeo.org
Subject: [Qgis-us-user] Is QGIS right for me?

Hello, and thank you in advance for any replies.

Background: I am a college professor looking for software to do some basic map-making - primarily for use in the classroom, but also for my own research. My college has moved to using free, open-access textbooks, and the maps are often out of date, and of poor quality compared to those found in expensive textbooks. I want to produce maps that contain current data, and that are easy for students to interpret. I took GIS classes in graduate school, but that was 20 years ago. I do not have a huge amount of time to learn new software.

Intended Use: I want to take open-access data from sources like the U.N. Human Development Report, the World Bank, etc. and map the data by country, or by geographic units within a country (state, county, etc.). The open-access data is typically available in Microsoft Excel, which is the format I prefer to download, as I am quite comfortable doing basic data-analysis in Excel, and producing tables and graphs in Excel for displaying the data.

Key Question: Can I upload an Excel file to QGIS?

Very Simple Example: I have an Excel file with country names in column 1, and their GDP in column 2, and their rank in column 3. I want to make a map of the world that presents each country by GDP, using five different shades of a color (e.g. the darker the color, the higher the GDP). I assume that there are shapefiles that list countries with a "country code" (e.g. Afghanistan = 1, Albania = 2, or something like that). If I had a fourth column in my Excel file that was "country code" would I be able to upload the Excel file to QGIS and quickly produce a simple map?

Online Compatible? It would be pretty cool if I could post the maps online, and have them be interactive, so that a student could click on a country and see the specific data (e.g. GDP, as mentioned above). This would be a nice feature, but not a necessary one.

Thank you very much for taking the time to read through this long post, and for any advice.

Ian
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