Open Water Foundation / Learn QGIS

This documentation provides resources to learn how to use the Quantum GIS (QGIS) software. QGIS is free and open source Geographic Information System (GIS) software. QGIS is an alternative to the commercial Esri ArcGIS software, in particular for individuals and organizations that cannot afford the cost of ArcGIS software or may have infrequent needs for GIS software. Both QGIS and ArcGIS offer desktop software, Python development libraries, and integrate with web mapping tools.

This documentation has been written based on experience using QGIS at the Open Water Foundation (OWF), with focus on tasks that are useful in water resources and solutions. This documentation focuses on the QGIS version 3 desktop software and support of Python application development efforts.

See also:

• QGIS Website
• Esri ArcGIS Pro
• Open Water Foundation GeoProcessor Software - software that automates geospatial processing
  • GeoProcessor User Documentation
  • GeoProcessor Developer Documentation
  • GeoProcessor Download page

About the Open Water Foundation

The Open Water Foundation is a nonprofit social enterprise that focuses on developing and supporting open source software for water resources, so that organizations can make better decisions about water. OWF has created this documentation to educate its staff, other developers, and clients that use QGIS for spatial data visualization and processing.

See also other OWF learning resources.

How to Use this Documentation

The documentation is organized in order of information and tasks necessary to setup a QGIS environment and use QGIS software for common tasks. This documentation is not intended to be a full reference for QGIS but focuses on important topics that will help understand important technical concepts and be successful with QGIS. The following main sections are included in this documentation:

• Introduction - an overview of QGIS software
• Install QGIS - explanation of how to install QGIS
• Map Configuration - information about creating maps
• Map Layers - information about map layers
• Automating Processing - information about how to automate GIS processes
• Resources - useful resources

Use the navigation menus on the left to navigate the full documentation. Use the navigation menus on the right to navigate sections within the current page. Menus may be compressed if the page size is narrow.

License

The OWF Learn QGIS website content and examples are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.

Source Repository on GitHub

The source files for this documentation are maintained in a GitHub repository: owf-learn-qgis.

Release Notes

The GitHub repository issues tracker is most often used to track progress.