Michel Stuyts

Absolute vs relative paths in QGIS projects

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The choice between absolute and relative paths is a setting in QGIS projects that I wasn’t aware of until the beginning of 2024. At that time I got the course material from a QGIS workshop a co-worker used to teach and which mentioned this option. Since then I have started teaching the QGIS workshops for this company and of course “Absolute and relative paths” is now also part of my workshops.

So is this an important setting? Well, you can use QGIS perfectly well without knowing that this setting exists, but it’s good to know about it – as you will see below. This blog post explains what absolute and relative paths are and when you should use each.

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Using Data Defined Overrides in QGIS

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Using Data Defined Overrides are a powerful tool in QGIS, but I’ve got the impression that too little people use this feature. So in this blog post you can learn what they are and I’ll show you a simple example of how to use them. You will notice this blog post is pretty long, but that doesn’t mean Data Defined Overrides are difficult, they just have loads of options and I wanted to show you every step I took to use them.

What are Data Defined Overrides?

In QGIS you can use data from a layer or an expression to change the value of a setting in a layer for that specific map object. This means that a setting is dynamically changed based on a value in the attribute table of that object or a value that is generated using an expression. In other words, if you use a Data Defined Override, the manually entered setting is ignored, and instead something else is used.

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Conditional formatting in QGIS attribute tables

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A feature in QGIS I rarely use, but if I need it, I’m glad it exists, is conditional formatting in QGIS attribute tables. The similar feature in Excel I use all the time, but QGIS has so many other possibilities to get things done, I use it less often.

So for those of you who haven’t used the feature, what is it? In short you can format cells or rows in the attribute tables based on the content of the cells. In the examples below I used it make empty cells to stand out in a attribute table that contains more than 2000 features. In the next part of this post I’ll go over the details of conditional formatting.

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A little hidden: the page settings for QGIS layouts

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The answer to a question on https://gis.exchange.com I wrote that gave me the most fake internet karma*, talks about the location of the page properties in QGIS layouts. The question can be found at https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/274148/setting-print-layout-to-portrait-using-qgis-3/274152#274152.

The page properties for layouts in QGIS, where you can change the page size and orientation in layouts are hard to find for users, especially in versions before QGIS 3.40. In that version the page properties were also added to the “Layout” menu, but in older versions it wasn’t available in the menubar.

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QGIS.tips: a blog with tips & tricks for QGIS

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Recently I was busy cleaning up the list of RSS feeds I follow using FreshRSS and I noticed the website http://qgis.tips no longer exists. So I checked if this domain name was available to register and it was. Since I already have a GIS blog where I regularly post about QGIS, I thought it would be cool to have one dedicated to QGIS, so I registered the domain.

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