In many real-life situations, we get additional non-spatial data in the form of spreadsheets or text files. The good news is we can load XLS files by simply dragging them into QGIS from the file browser or using Add Vector Layer. Don't let the wording fool you! It really works without any geometry data in the file. The file can even contain more than just one table. You will see the following dialog, which lets you choose which table(s) you want to load:
QGIS will automatically recognize the names and data types of columns in an XLS table. It's quite easy to tell because numeric values are right-aligned in the attribute table as shown in the following screenshot:
We can also load tabular data from delimited text files like we saw in Chapter 2, Viewing Spatial Data, when we loaded a point layer from a delimited text file. To load a delimited text file that only contains tabular data but no geometry information, we just need to enable the No geometry (attribute table only...