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I am using QGIS 2.14.2 but whenever I try to plot my coordinates(Lat/Long; decimal degrees) from a CSV file, no coordinates are plotted. I even tried converting the coordinates from lat/long to UTM before re-uploading the CSV file but it still failed to plot the points. Interestingly, the layer's attribute table shows that everything is well captured. BUT there are no points plotted on the display. What do I do?

Mark
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  • What is the CRS of the display? Also which did you use as the x value (lat or long)? – MappaGnosis Nov 17 '17 at 07:58
  • The CRS of the display is WGS84 and FYI, I also tried enabling 'on the fly' CRS transformation but still failed. I use the longitude for the X value – Mark Nov 17 '17 at 08:01
  • That's eliminated three very common problems - have you tried right-clicking on your layer and zoom to layer (assuming there is any data in the attribute table as per @LaughU's comment - also can you show us a snippet of your points data – MappaGnosis Nov 17 '17 at 08:05
  • I tried right-clicking and zooming to layer, BUT all that failed. And yes, the attribute table is populated and rightfully so. I would like to share with you the data and also a pic view of the attribute table but i don't really know how to do it on this platform. Any help with directions of how to? – Mark Nov 17 '17 at 08:21
  • The fact you've not mentioned the process you are using to load the CSV makes me think you aren't doing the right thing - see answer below. – Spacedman Nov 17 '17 at 09:09
  • make sure that NoData entries are removed from your data. – RutgerH Nov 17 '17 at 12:25

2 Answers2

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I figured it out. The problem was that the "zoom to layer" wasn't helping out(I wonder why!!). So, for some reason, the points had been plotted but they had been thrown off the screen. So as I panned the map canvas in different directions, i discovered that the points had been plotted but it looked like just one point had been plotted yet all of them had been plotted but stacked together to look like just one point.

So, the next step was to manually zoom in by clicking the zoom-in button and with the zoom-cursor, drag a "zoom-box" over the points. This gradually spread them out and I was able to view them all, and verify them.

Thanks a lot and I hope this is of help to someone else in a similar situation.

Mark
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You've not told us how you are loading the layer in. You should always give as much detail of your process as possible.

The correct way is to use the "Add Layer" menu and the "Delimited Text Layer..." option. This lets you load the CSV and choose which columns are latitude and longitude. This dialog should appear:

enter image description here

If you aren't seeing that dialog then you are doing something wrong.

If you load a CSV from the "Browser" or via the general "Add Vector Layer" it doesn't go through those steps and you get a non-spatial table in the layers list. Its icon is a little table icon. Here's two versions of the same CSV in the layers, first was loaded correctly, and has the icon for "points", the second wrongly, and is a table with no geometry:

enter image description here

Spacedman
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  • I followed the right procedure to add a CSV into QGIS. I clicked on "add layer", then I selected "Delimited Text Layer" and the same dialog box that you have showed above appeared and I followed as explained above. I made sure that it considered the longitudes as the X and the Latitudes as the Y. Then after going through the whole process, the resultant layer is exactly like yours with a coloured dot as the icon not a table icon. But the points are not plotted in the map interface. If only I knew how to attach the CSV and the picture snippets here, I would have. I need directions on how to. – Mark Nov 17 '17 at 10:10