Book Image

QGIS Quick Start Guide

By : Andrew Cutts
Book Image

QGIS Quick Start Guide

By: Andrew Cutts

Overview of this book

QGIS is a user friendly, open source geographic information system (GIS). The popularity of open source GIS and QGIS, in particular, has been growing rapidly over the last few years. This book is designed to help beginners learn about all the tools required to use QGIS 3.4. This book will provide you with clear, step-by-step instructions to help you apply your GIS knowledge to QGIS. You begin with an overview of QGIS 3.4 and its installation. You will learn how to load existing spatial data and create vector data from scratch. You will then be creating styles and labels for maps. The final two chapters demonstrate the Processing toolbox and include a brief investigation on how to extend QGIS. Throughout this book, we will be using the GeoPackage format, and we will also discuss how QGIS can support many different types of data. Finally, you will learn where to get help and how to become engaged with the GIS community.
Table of Contents (9 chapters)

Creating Data

In this chapter, we will be creating GIS data. We will predominantly be working with GeoPackages. This is the default format for storing GIS data in QGIS 3.4. Instead of the many extensions that a Shapefile has, a GeoPackage can have hundreds of layers contained in one file, making it simpler to share and manage.

We will look at creating geometries of points, lines, and polygons. We will add attributes to a attribute table and use the Field Calculator to calculate the area of a polygon. We will briefly discuss the use of scratch layers and exporting our data to a Shapefile. Finally, we will look at how raster data is imported into a GeoPackage.

In this chapter, you will learn about the following topics:

  • Creating a GeoPackage
  • Creating vector data:
    • Editing geometry
    • Creating attributes
  • Scratch layers and saving as a Shapefile
  • Working with raster data in a GeoPackage...