Well, if you’ve made it this far, you’ve downloaded QGIS and you have a project file opened. Well done! You’ve made it farther than >90% of all fictional mapmakers! Now that you’ve got a shapefile on your project file, it’s time to learn some things you can do with it.
2.1 - The Map
If you remember back to 1.4, we only added one shapefile to our project file, and that’s what the map is currently showing us. It can be zoomed and manipulated by a trackpad or by a scroll wheel, thereby making it very easy to see both the big picture and the minute details of your project file. However, just zooming in and out is boring, let’s go into some fun stuff you can do to your map.
2.2 - The Lower Bar
Going from left to right across the Lower Bar, you’ll notice a few different features, the first one being a search bar with the words “Type to locate.” I’ll be real with you here, I have no clue what that does, you can probably just ignore it.
Next on the list is fairly straightforward - the Coordinates field. This field shows you the latitude and longitude of your mouse cursor and updates in real-time, very helpful for getting a feel of Earth’s coordinate system.
Going to the right, you’ll see the Scale field next. This field simply tells you how “zoomed-in” your map is, and this field actually changes not only when you zoom around the map, but also when you resize your QGIS tab - try it out! For example, a Scale field value of 1:1,000,000 means that every inch of map on your computer screen represents 1,000,000 inches (about 15.8 miles!) of real-world terrain.
Next up, we have the Magnifier field. This one magnifies the map without changing the Scale, which honestly isn’t really all that useful - I generally ignore the Magnifier field.
The Rotation field does exactly what it says on the tin, you get the picture.
The very last thing on the Lower Bar is by far the most interesting. Upon opening a new QGIS project file, this last thing will be set to “EPSG:4326” by default. This is your map projection, and it’s a very important thing to keep in mind. EPSG:4326 is the Equirectangular projection, where all your maps will have perfect right angles and all world maps are a perfect 2:1 width to height ratio. If you wish to change your map projection, simply click on the button and it will take you to this screen:
There’s a lot of information here, most of it irrelevant to us now, but type in “ESRI:54030,” choose the “World_Robinson” projection, and click OK.
Congratulations, you’ve just “re-projected” an entire world map in the time it takes to microwave a single Hot Pocket.
2.3 - The Toolbars
This is going to be the most complex section of this lesson, so take it as slow as you need to - I promise the knowledge you gain will be well worth it. Your first step here is to go to View -> Toolbars, and make sure you’ve got the same toolbars selected/deselected as shown in this image.
Once you’ve finished with that, it’s time to get into the details of what exactly everything on your enabled toolbars does.
On the top toolbar, there are a few (hopefully) familiar icons. New Project, Open Project, and Save Project are represented respectively by the paper, the folder, and the floppy disk. To the right of those icons are the Print Layout, Layout Manager, and Style Manager. Those will be important to us eventually, but for now, let’s just keep moving along. The hand icon is the Pan Map option, and the four blue arrows to the right of it represent the Pan Map to Selection option.
Then comes the familiar Zoom In and Zoom Out magnifying glasses, the Zoom Full option (which shows the full map, and then the Zoom to Selection and Zoom to Layer options. Zoom to Selection zooms to anything you currently have selected, while Zoom to Layer zooms to show the full extent of your current layer. The Zoom Last and Zoom Next buttons are next, think of those as your “undo” and “redo” buttons for previous zooms you’ve done.
The following four buttons (those icons with the 6-pointed white stars and the bookmarked paper) are relatively unknown to me, they don’t contain anything very important to my knowledge, so I’ll skip them for the time being.
The last two buttons on the upper toolbar are the Temporal Controller Panel, which is helpful if you have a shapefile that shows different points in time (such as the one used to create
Territorial History of the USA: Every Month for 400 Years). The final button on the upper toolbar is the simple yet mighty Refresh button. Yes, you can just use F5 too.
Many of the buttons on the lower toolbar are currently disabled because our layer is not currently in Edit Mode, and most of the currently enabled buttons are positively useless to us until we have some more practice with the other aspects of QGIS, so I’ll cover the lower taskbar (and others!) in later lessons. With that said, it’s time to move on to this lessons last section:
2.4 - The Layers
Last lesson, I only had you download and import one shapefile into QGIS, and that was for a reason - it helps immensely to keep things as simple as we can in these early days.
Following along with this screenshot, we can see a “Browser” section and a “Layers” section. We’ll want to ignore the Browser section for now, instead focusing on the Layers section. We’ve only imported one shapefile into this project file, so there’s only one entry in Layers - our ne_10m_coastline layer. There are several buttons immediately above our layer entry, but only the two buttons on the very edges matter. The leftmost button is the Layer Styling Panel, and it serves to open a new panel on the right side of your screen detailing all sorts of things about how your layer looks. Feel free to play around and familiarize yourself with those settings, but I won’t cover them in detail here. The rightmost button is the Remove Layer button, and it does exactly what it sounds like. Lastly, the checkbox next to your layer name shows whether or not that layer will be made visible. So, if you want your layers invisible but not deleted, use the checkbox.
That’s all I have for this lesson, so onto the homework!
Homework #2
- Open your project file and change the projection of your map to World Robinson.
- Use the Coordinate field and your scroll wheel to zoom onto (0.00, 0.00), then use the “Zoom to Layer” button to return to a global view.
- Open the Layer Styling Panel and change at least one thing about the appearance of the “ne_10m_coastline” layer.
- Use the floppy disk icon in the upper taskbar to save your project file.
