Styling your data and preparing it for exporting

Now your data is in....how to make it look good?

Styling your data

Let's look at different ways to style your data using some archaeological data from the site of Gabii originally imported as a .geojson.

When initially imported, all the polygons are red with a black outline, which gives us some general information about the location but doesn't really differentiate the different kinds of archaeological features present. To do that, we need to change our styling.

Initial Import

To get to the styling options (also called Symbology), just double click the layer name in your Layers pane.

Symbology Menu

Here you can select how you want your features to be styled; the default is "Single Symbol" but often times you will want Categorized, or for quantitative attibutes, Graduated, ways of displaying your features. For now, let's select Categorized.

Ways to Symbolize

When stylizing by category, you can select which Attribute(s) you want to stylize by; I'm going to select the Descriptio(n) field because that's the different types of features in my layer.

Select your Attribute

Once you've picked your attribute, clicking "Classify" at the bottom of the box will assign an initial style to each of your features.

Each feature type is now a different color! You could further customize each individual style if you wanted on the symbology page.

Or, here I have made the color of the outline of the feature change, rather than the fill, in order to make the map more understandable.

Lots can be done with symbology; feel free to explore!

Preparing to Export Your Figure

Exporting your figure to share with others or for publication is often the final product for your QGIS map. Here we talk about the basics.

So far we have been working in what I call "Data View" where you can create, edit, and generally mess with your data. Now we are going to look at Print Layout, which allows you to organize your map for publication.

To access print layout, go to Project-->New Print Layout. A box will appear asking for you to name the layout (useful if you are creating mulitiple figures, for example).

A new window will appear that lets you create your layout, almost like working in a word document.

The left toolbar is your friend, allowing you to add map windows to the figure, as well as things like maps, north arrows, titles, legends, and other labels.

Each time you add a feature, it will appear in what is basically the "Layers" sidebar of your print layout, allowing you to further edit its properties. Above I've quickly added a scale bar, north arrow, and legend to the map.

When it looks good, you can export the figure! My figure below is a .tiff