QGIS 3.10 BASICS - Lesson 1 - Setup

hi all and welcome to this QGIS basics session hope you're all staying healthy and sane during the lockdown the original idea of this was to do it as a webinar but I ultimately decided to do this as a recording instead there's two reasons firstly such a huge number of you that have been interested I'm not entirely convinced that my software and hardware would have been able to support all of you in a webinar at the same time and also I kind of forget I'm working from home at the moment and my internet connection is nowhere near what it is like at work so I've done a few webinars recently and had some kind of buffering issues so yeah ultimately decided to do this as a recording my also try and do a webinar just to see how it works out but as a backup yeah recording this locally and releasing it to you all now so I must say we're gonna be using QGIS 3.10 for these sessions not going to say too much about myself I'll keep that quite quite brief so I am a consultant ecologist I work for a company called ty Lagrange I have their full blessing and support for these sessions not seen as a conflict of interest of the business and I'm also using some of their resources to actually produce these sessions as well so I feel they do deserve a mention so let's get started then our first lesson is going to be all about setting up QGIS looking at the general environment of the program and also looking at the options and settings that can be useful to you so let's open a huge yes so it mainly when you open QGIS for the I may look a little bit like this it may not look exactly like this because I've rearranged some of my menus toolbars so the best way to get everyone looking similar is to start a new project well just go project new and that I'll clear off anything from the screen that was a welcome screen that shows you kind of past projects and also some news from from the people at the QGIS project so this is our main mapping area the big white expanse there at the moment on the left here we have a panel which we can pull out of there have a free floating dock it off onto the side put it anywhere we want basically you can get access to additional panels by right clicking on any of the toolbars should say these are the top these are toolbars if you right-click here you get two panels and toolbars pop up you can basically just tick to open and close those same with the toolbars got a series of different ones open here turn that one on and then turn it back on you can pull these out again you can have them free floating around here dock them off to the side combine them basically however you want it and just drop that back off there you can also if you've got multiple panels open let's just create a new one here sometimes they open those tabs you can grab one of those tabs and on docket and if you drop it back on top of an existing panel it'll put it into this tabbed format I'd say opened up I'll just get rid of that long so don't particularly want advanced digitizing so you have to lots of options and settings for qgis settings and options shows you the global options for the whole program some of them can be quite useful to have a little bit of a play with from a change so when that welcome page came up at the start you can change that to the most recent project a specific divert this ah a specific designated project that you want to open or just a new project each time and it'll create a blank window I generally have a setup as new I just changed it to welcome page because that's what most people have when they open up for the first time today let's have a little browse through these options to see if there's any other useful ones that you're going to want to be changing system i've minimised all these in advance because there's nothing in there that I would recommend you be changing CRS which stands for chord and reference system is something very important for QGIS I'm not going to go into coordinate reference systems I have done a separate video on this that's on the YouTube channel at the moment so if you're unfamiliar with coordinate reference systems I recommend you give that a little bit of a watch all of the work that we're going to be doing today will be solely in the brush National Grid coordinate reference system and that's what majority of work that I personally do myself obviously been an ecologist in Great Britain so quadrant approached corner reference sessions project he can set up so that there's a default I set it up for British National Grid if you want to change that the drop-down generally has the ones that you've selected in the past so if you can't see in there press this button here search for ish National Grid pop-up here or so known as epsg to 7700 so double click on that I just need a single click actually press ok then any new project that is loaded well so I created in QGIS will have this as its default coordinate reference system so creating new layers I always have it self as prompt for CRS most of the time you will be creating layers just in the British National Grid coordinate reference system but there are exceptions when you mail be boiling something different into your project say you're bringing in data from a GPS handset or a set of yes yet UPS coordinates for the come with some legend so you can change the default background color to anything you want also when you're selecting features they'll highlight in a transparent yellow color you can change that to whatever you want can spin the wheel for different colors and then within each color you can change two different kind of tones and hues you can also make it more or less transparent I'm gonna have to remember to cancel this when I come out because I don't particularly want that color I want a yellow on I want a transparent yellow double click action in legend this will make more sense once we start working either opening properties our attribute table or styling I have it set as properties but for awhile I've been saying I want it to the attribute table so I'm going to change that now tools main one in here is your measurement the units that you are actually using to when you make measurements of area and lengthen angle you can change what that's actually measured in sometimes you may want to change the area or if you're measuring larger things you might want to change that default colors digitizing you can change your rubber band colors again this will make more sense later when I show you exactly what a rubber band is you've got a default snapping options again will covers nothing vertex markers I like to sure-sure the vertices for all features again that olds be something that makes more sense later I'll try to remember to point out what that is I don't believe there are any other useful options and here that you'd want to fiddle with at the moment so we'll cancel that I'll go back to my original yellow selection color there as well so that's the options for the main program you then have properties for a specific project that you're working in and they can override the options that are used in the actual main project properties so again we've got a selection and background color you've got how how files are actually saved in terms of relative or absolute file paths again you've got units of distance and area measurements coordinate reference system for the project should be British National Grid which it is just make sure default styles are generally don't work with any default styles default opacity so that basically is how transparent the layers are as we load them in it's nothing really left in there which that you'd really want to have a fiddle around on a basic level so to create a new project that is the easiest thing to do project new that's all you have to do to start a new project I'm gonna discard the last one so then save this project that's a little bit different project and save and then it'll give you the option to just save that gray a new folder this is where it's gonna store all the files give the project a name but then two options qgz sorry yeah coogee Zed or q GS so Q G Zed is the new project format standard for any QGIS project above three any any version of QGIS above 3.1 so in this in 3.10 that's what it would default to docq GS is basically the old project format that would be still compatible with all the versions so for now while some people that I'm working with maybe still be using an old version of QGIS I'm just gonna keep on using q GS for now until I know that everyone is working on qgz type files because that may cause issues so if we save that we go to our desktop it's this awful the way we've saved that in will basically have our new key J's project there and that is a huge e yes and that is the very basics on setting up a new QGIS project our next step obviously we're not going to stop there is base maps

Channel: QGIS for Ecologists

Views: 24,662

Rating: 4.9143729 out of 5

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Id: dm1iFRqC31I

Length: 13min 45sec (825 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 28 2020