There is a lot of data with spatial components stored in spreadsheets and tables. One of the most common forms of tabular spatial data are x and y coordinates that are stored in a delimited text file. The data may have been collected with a GPS receiver, it may have been generated by a surveyor, or it may have been transcribed off topographic maps. Regardless, QGIS can map these coordinates as points by using the Add Delimited Text Layer tool (). This tool can be found by navigating to Layer | Add Layer | Add Delimited Text Layer or on the Manage Layers toolbar.

Delimited text data is simply a table with column breaks that are identified by a specific character such as a comma. With this tool, QGIS can accept either x and y coordinates or Well-Known Text (WKT) representations of geometry. WKT can contain point, line, or polygon geometry. The following is a sample data, cougar_sightings.csv, viewed in a text editor. This is a comma-delimited file with x...