Now, we can prepare the delimited text file with the state plane coordinates. QGIS has a plugin (a tool that you call when you need it) that allows you to turn X/Y coordinates lists into GIS layers as long as they are in a .txt (text) file. Prepare a text file with the coordinates delimited by commas "," (it could also work with other delimiters like tabs, spaces...). The first line of the file will have the names of the column headers or the field names. We've added a couple of campus locations to the cache point to provide some context.

The next image shows the x/y data organized in nice colums, the second image shows how the text file should look for QGIS to read it. Don't worry if, in your text file, your headers (x, y, Use, etc...) don't line up in columns with the coordinates--QGIS will not look at spacing, only at commmas. For this lab, we will use a text composer like notepad in Windows, or kwrite in Linux. Name the file "Geocatching.txt" and save it in your work folder.

Figure 5: Parsed text file

Figure 6: Comma delimited text file

Note that we added an "empty" column or field called "USE". In QGIS you can edit the fields in attribute tables of shapefiles, but you cannot add or delete fields. So if you are planning to enter information about the GPS points in different fields, you should either enter all the information during the text file preparation, as we did in the column "SITE", or just enter the name of the field (as in "USE") and fill in the blanks later in QGIS.