[GIS] Creating Shapefile from Excel Data

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I have an Excel file with three columns, IncidentID, Latitude, and Longitude. Each row in the file corresponds to an incident and the location of the incident in units of decimal degrees.

I also have a road shapefile of the area in which these incidents occurred. The road shapefile has the WGS_1984_UTM_Zone_42N Projected Coordinate System and GCS_WGS_1984 Geographic Coordinate System and whose whose units (as far as I can tell) are in meters.

I can use 'Add Data' to add the excel file, and then use 'Display XY Data' to import the data, but the import interprets the Latitude and Longitude values as meter values. How do I tell ArcGIS to interpret the Latitude and Longitude values as decimal degree values?

Best Answer

When you Display X/Y Data, setting the Coordinate System to GCS_WGS_1984 should give you values in decimal degrees.

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[GIS] Importing coordinate data from Excel into QGIS

If you already have your data in excel make sure of the following a)Data must be in decimal degrees b)First row of the file has the name of the field (this is just an example) enter image description here

then you have to save the file as a csv comma delimited (not msdos or mac). After opening Qgis you have to look for the "add delimited text layer plugin (a blue postit with commas icon). enter image description here

You have to define that the delimiter is commas and choose the appropiate x and y fileds. When Qgis Opens the data it will ask for the CRS, you have to define the one for your data. The data you are looking in the image is latlon wgs 84, so I choosed EPSG4326. Once your data is loaded you can save the text layer to another type of file like shp. Hope it helps

[GIS] Add an Excel file with a list of coordinates to QGIS as a layer

You can often make a WKT (Well Known Text) column in Excel without too much fiddling, which effectively creates a spatial definition for points, lines or polygons within a single field.

What you want to do is create a WKT string, in the format:

POLYGON((X1 Y1, X2 Y2, X3 Y3, X4 Y4, X1 Y1))

You can create new columns in Excel with the below formulas. The first ('clean') substitutes the commas for spaces, then the semicolons for commas; the second ('wkt') creates a WKT string (concatenating text with &) - the only tricky part is finding and repeating the first coordinate pair to close the polygon:

clean: =SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(B2, ",", " "), ";", ",")
wkt: ="POLYGON(("&C2&","&MID(C2,1, FIND(", ",C2)-1)&"))"

This can be saved as CSV, and the WKT field selected for import.

Best Answer

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[GIS] Importing coordinate data from Excel into QGIS

[GIS] Add an Excel file with a list of coordinates to QGIS as a layer

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