QGIS – Add X&Y Fields to a Layer

By David Crowther

QGIS 3.8 Zanzibar was released in August 2019 and the full change log can be viewed here:

https://qgis.org/en/site/forusers/visualchangelog38/index.html

Here is a great new tool which allows you to Add X and Y Fields to a layer without having to create the columns and run an update script manually.

Add X&Y Fields to a Layer

In the video below we use the new Add X/Y Fields to Layer tool to extract the X and Y coordinates of our Schools layer.

In QGIS 3.8 we can now drag and drop the required layer (Schools) into the new Add X/Y Fields to Layer tool, choose what projection to extract the coordinates in e.g. BNG (27700), WGS 84 (4326) etc…. and also provide a prefix to the new field names.

Once the tool runs a new layer is created with the coordinates now extracted and added as 2 new columns in the file. This is a lot easier than using the Field Calculator tool and running the extract manually.