GIS-03 Visualising Location Data

Owned by Antony Scott (Deactivated)
Last updated: 21 Mar, 2023
2 min read

3. Visualising Location Data

In this exercise you will add some simple styling and labels to line, polygon and point data.

3.1. Load and style point data

  1. In the QGIS project you have been working on, load the railway stations layer:

    1. Go to Layer > Add Layer > Add Vector Layer and under Source, navigate to D:\PhotonUser\My Files\Home Folder\QGIS Training\Data\vector\railway_naptan.gpkg and click Open

    2. Click Add then Close to load the data

    3. Right-click > Zoom to layer extent on the layer

  2. Double-click on the layer to load the Layer Properties dialog, and navigate to the Symbology tab

  3. In the lower part of the screen are a number of preset styles - to see more, delete the text Favorites from the filter field just above the styles

  4. Click on one of the styles to load it, then select the elements of the style in the panel at the top and change the settings to see how the style changes

  5. At any stage, click the Apply button to see how the style looks on the map

  6. To apply a train image to the railway stations:

    1. Choose one of the basic styles - e.g. dot blue

    2. In the upper panel, click on Simple Marker

    3. In the dropdown just below the panel, change Simple Marker to SVG Marker

    4. A new panel, SVG browser will open below - under SVG Groups, navigate to transport and select an image

    5. Change the Stroke color and Width settings to set the size and colour, then click Apply to see the results

  7. Click OK to close the dialog

3.2. Load and style line data

  1. Follow the same procedure as you did for point data above, but this time, load the railway_line.shp data

  2. Try loading a few of the preset styles, and see how they are constructed

  3. Load the topo railway style and apply it to the layer, and click on each of the elements of the style in the upper panel to see its settings - make some changes to these to see the effects

  4. When you are done, click OK to close the dialog

3.3. Load and style polygon data

  1. This time, load some polygon data - aonb_england.gpkg

  2. Turn off the other layers in the layer list, and zoom to the new layer

  3. Double-click on the layer, and again in the Symbology tab, delete the Favorites text to see all the in-built styles

  4. By default the layer will have a Simple Fill applied

  5. Expand the Layer Rendering section at the bottom of the dialog, and drag the Opacity slider to make the layer roughly 50% transparent - click Apply to see the effect of this

  6. Select on of the other styles in the panel in the middle - for example hashed cred / - to see how this looks

  7. in the top panel, click on each of the elements in the style to see how it is made up - if you have time, change some of the settings to see the effects

You should now have three layers, one lines, one points, and one polygons, with hour own styling applied.