Adding data from Excel (CSV)

Often data's not in any kind of GIS format.…CSV, comma separated values, can contain the X and Y,…or latitude and longitude columns.…They can be created as an export from another GIS,…or even from a GPS device.…Let's look at a CSV now.…In Exercise Files, under DATA, CSV,…there's a CSV file called incidents.…We open that up in Excel,…you can see we have file,…reportedtime, occurence, and crimetypes.…

Inside the CSV we also have two columns,…a latitude and a longitude with the x and y values…of where each crime took place.…We can actually use this Excel sheet,…or CSV file inside of QGIS.…Let's close Excel,…don't bother saving, and open up QGIS desktop.…Just to add some context I'm going to add…the ROAD_CENTERLINES to the map first,…before I add my crime incidents.…So now under Layer, Add Delimited Text Layer.…

We'll browse to that same text file we were just looking at,…that incidents.csv, and click open.…Make sure the File format is CSV (comma separated values).…We also have to choose what the X and Y field are.…So the X field is long, or longitude.…