Free Geography Tools

This is the final installment in my screencast series on MapWindow GIS. In addition to an easy-to-use shapefile editor, MapWindow has some advanced tools for combining, manipulating, and selecting from shapefile layers that aren’t all that common in freeware GIS software.

Among these are:

• Clip Shapefile With Polygon – Finds the intersection between two shapefile layers (“And” operation)
• Erase Shapefile With Polygon – Erases shapefile with another shapefile; useful for “Not” operation, or creating shapefiles with holes in the polygons
• Merge Shapes – Combine shapes in different layers (“Or” operation)
• Clip Polygon With Line – Split a polygon into two separate polygons using an arbitrarily-shaped line
• Buffer Shapes – Create a new polygon layer whose shapes are defined by shapes in another layer (point, line or polygon) plus a specifiable buffer distance
• Export Shapes To New Shapefile By Mask – Select shapes in one layer by using shapes in another; combine it with Buffer Shapes for spatial selection (e.g. buffer a city by 10 kilometers, then use that buffer layer and this tool to select all cities within 10 kilometers of the selected city)

Here’s a screencast that demonstrates some of these functions: