Free Geography Tools

Second in my series of screencasts on MapWindow GIS is a brief look at MapWindow’s shapefile attribute data handling. It has some nice extra features that you might not find in other freeware GIS programs.

Among these features are:

• The ability to dock and expand the attribute data window to the side of the screen while you’re querying features on the map. This gives you a bigger and better view of the data than you often get with floating data windows.
• Direct editing of attribute table data, including adding, removing and renaming data fields.
• Sorting of attribute data in ascending or descending order
• A built-in field data calculator that lets you create new data fields based on data from other data fields. Calculation operators include arithmetic, statistical, string and boolean operators.
• Standard shape selection either by query (e.g. =,>,<, AND, NOT, etc.) or by clicking on attribute table rows.
• The ability to display all shapes, or only selected ones.
• On-map selection of shapes translates into selection in the attribute table; selection in the attribute table highlights the selected shapes on the map.
• Export of selected shapes into a new shapefile.

Here are two screencasts that demonstrate most of these features.