<p dir="ltr">I understand your need and maybe it is worth a ticket, and maybe a sponsorship :) </p>
<p dir="ltr">To keep a "live connection" with your spreadsheet you could create an OGR virtual layer, using the OGR Virtual Format [1]. Yet an extra step but this way your updates to the spreadsheet are automatically seen in your QGIS project. </p>
<p dir="ltr">Giovanni </p>
<p dir="ltr">[1] <a href="http://www.gdal.org/ogr/drv_xls.html">http://www.gdal.org/ogr/drv_xls.html</a></p>
<div class="gmail_quote">Il 05/nov/2013 20:41 "Brent Wood" <<a href="mailto:pcreso@pcreso.com">pcreso@pcreso.com</a>> ha scritto:<br type="attribution"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div><div style="font-size:12pt;font-family:times new roman,new york,times,serif">Cheers...<br><br>I don't want to create shapefiles or csv's, etc, from spreadsheets, I just want to plot *.xls files which contain x/y columns on the map.<br>
<br>I sort of figured that if a GIS tool can open an xls file this would be pretty basic functionality... perhaps optimistically :-)<br><br>The use case I'm envisaging is a live Excel spreadsheet used to store data. New rows (records) are added as appropriate. A QGIS project includes the spreadsheet as a current layer - so a QGIS user can open the spreadsheet, as well as other map layers, & save the project. Reopening the project would automatically plot all the rows in the spreadsheet on the map.<br>
<br>The only ways I can see to achieve this functionality involve recreating another copy of the spreadsheet in another format before I can view the points on the map.
Which is an annoying extra few steps every time I want to view the spreadsheet. <br><br><div><span>Is this worth filing a ticket for? Perhaps add some extra functionality in the vector layer dialogue: if the file type opened is an xls, allow the user to (optionally) specify the column identifiers for the X & Y coords & the SRID to apply? </span></div>
<div style="font-style:normal;font-size:16px;background-color:transparent;font-family:times new roman,new york,times,serif"><br><span></span></div><div style="font-style:normal;font-size:16px;background-color:transparent;font-family:times new roman,new york,times,serif">
<span>Brent Wood<br></span></div><div><br></div> <div style="font-family:times new roman,new york,times,serif;font-size:12pt"> <div style="font-family:times new roman,new york,times,serif;font-size:12pt"> <div dir="ltr">
<hr size="1"> <font face="Arial"> <b><span style="font-weight:bold">From:</span></b> G. Allegri <<a href="mailto:giohappy@gmail.com" target="_blank">giohappy@gmail.com</a>><br> <b><span style="font-weight:bold">To:</span></b> Brent Wood <<a href="mailto:pcreso@pcreso.com" target="_blank">pcreso@pcreso.com</a>> <br>
<b><span style="font-weight:bold">Cc:</span></b> "<a href="mailto:qgis-user@lists.osgeo.org" target="_blank">qgis-user@lists.osgeo.org</a>" <<a href="mailto:qgis-user@lists.osgeo.org" target="_blank">qgis-user@lists.osgeo.org</a>> <br>
<b><span style="font-weight:bold">Sent:</span></b> Wednesday, November 6, 2013 8:15 AM<br> <b><span style="font-weight:bold">Subject:</span></b> Re: [Qgis-user] How do I georeference an xls file opened in QGIS 2.0<br> </font> </div>
<div><br><div><div><div dir="ltr">I don't know if there's a plugin for that. <div>Otherwise you could use Processing. Under QGIS geoalgorithms -> Vector creation tools you find Points layer from file. If you right click on it and choose Execute as batch process, you could generate all the shapefiles in one shot.</div>
<div><br clear="none"></div><div>giovanni</div></div><div><br clear="none"><br clear="none"><div>2013/11/5 Brent Wood <span dir="ltr"><<a rel="nofollow" shape="rect" href="mailto:pcreso@pcreso.com" target="_blank">pcreso@pcreso.com</a>></span><br clear="none">
<blockquote style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div><div><div style="font-size:12pt;font-family:times new roman,new york,times,serif"><div style="font-style:normal;font-size:16px;background-color:transparent;font-family:times new roman,new york,times,serif">
<br clear="none"><span></span></div><div style="font-style:normal;font-size:16px;background-color:transparent;font-family:times new roman,new york,times,serif"><span>I can open an XLS file OK, using vector dialogue, change file type to all, choose an xls file (created by Open Office) & I can open it & view the attribute table fine.</span></div>
<div style="font-style:normal;font-size:16px;background-color:transparent;font-family:times new roman,new york,times,serif"><br clear="none"><span></span></div><div style="font-style:normal;font-size:16px;background-color:transparent;font-family:times new roman,new york,times,serif">
<span>What I'm unable to do is tell QGIS which columns to use for the lat/lon columns (each row represents a point). I can do this if I save the xls as a csv & open the delimited text file, but is there any way to do this natively with the xls file? I don't want to store a QGIS csv version of every spreadsheet....</span></div>
<span><font color="#888888"></font></span><div style="font-style:normal;font-size:16px;background-color:transparent;font-family:times new roman,new york,times,serif"><br clear="none"><span></span></div><div style="font-style:normal;font-size:16px;background-color:transparent;font-family:times new roman,new york,times,serif">
<span>Brent Wood</span></div><br clear="none"><div style="font-family:times new roman,new york,times,serif;font-size:12pt"><div style="font-family:times new roman,new york,times,serif;font-size:12pt"><br clear="none"> </div>
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