Book Image

Learning QGIS 2.0

By : Anita Graser
Book Image

Learning QGIS 2.0

By: Anita Graser

Overview of this book

QGIS is a user friendly open source geographic information system (GIS) that runs on Linux, Unix, Mac OSX, and Windows. The popularity of open source geographic information systems and QGIS in particular has been growing rapidly over the last few years. More and more companies and institutions are adopting QGIS and even switching to QGIS as their main GIS. Learning QGIS 2.0 is a practical, hands-on guide that provides you with clear, step-by-step exercises that will help you to apply your GIS knowledge to QGIS. Containing a number of clear, practical exercises, this book will introduce you to working with QGIS, quickly and painlessly. If you want to take advantage of the wide range of functionalities that QGIS offers, then this is the book for you. This book takes you from installing and configuring QGIS, through handling spatial data to creating great maps. You will learn how to load and visualize existing spatial data and how to create data from scratch. You will perform common geoprocessing and spatial analysis tasks and automate them. We will cover how to achieve great cartographic output and print maps. You will learn everything you need to know to handle spatial data management, processing, and visualization tasks in QGIS.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Editing attributes


There are three main use cases for attribute editing. First, we might want to edit the attributes of one specific feature, for example, to fix a wrong name. Second, we might want to edit attributes of a group of features. Or third, we might want to change the attributes of all the features within a layer. All these use cases are covered by functionality available through the attribute table. We can access it by going to Layer | Open Attribute Table, the Open Attribute Table button present in the Attributes toolbar, or in the layer name context menu.

To change attribute values, we always have to first enable editing. Then we can double-click on any cell in the attribute table to activate the input mode. Clicking on Enter confirms the change, but to save the new value permanently, we have to also click on the Save Edit(s) button or press Ctrl + S. In the bottom-right corner of the attribute table dialog, we can switch from the table to the form view, as shown in the following...