Joining tabular data

In many real-life situations, we get additional non-spatial data in the form of spreadsheets or text files. The good news is that we can load XLS files by simply dragging them into QGIS from the file browser or using Add Vector Layer. Don't let the wording fool you! It really works without any geometry data in the file. The file can even contain more than one table. You will see the following dialog, which lets you choose which table (or tables) you want to load:

QGIS will automatically recognize the names and data types of columns in an XLS table. It's quite easy to tell because numerical values are aligned to the right in the attribute table, as shown in this screenshot:

We can also load tabular data from delimited text files, as we saw in Chapter 2, Viewing Spatial Data, when we loaded a point layer from a delimited text file. To load a delimited text file that contains only tabular data but no geometry information, we just need to enable the No geometry (attribute...