There is a lot of data with spatial components stored in spreadsheets and tables. One of the most common forms of tabular spatial data is 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 sample data, cougar_sightings.csv, viewed in a text editor. This is a comma-delimited file with x and y...