Chapter 2. Viewing Spatial Data

In this chapter, we will cover how to view spatial data from different data sources. QGIS supports many file and database formats as well as standardized Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Services. We will first cover how we can load layers from these different data sources. We will then look into the basics of styling both vector and raster layers and will create our first map, which you can see in the following screenshot:

We will finish this chapter with an example of loading background maps from online services.

Note

For the examples in this chapter, we will use the sample data provided by the QGIS project, which is available for download from http://qgis.org/downloads/data/qgis_sample_data.zip (21 MB). Download and unzip it.