Excel XLSX
Open BetaMap export to Excel (.xlsx) format with coordinates and WKT geometry. Opens in Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, LibreOffice. Each layer is a separate sheet.
Key Features
About Excel Format
XLSX is a Microsoft Excel workbook, the ISO 29500 standard (OOXML). For geodata it is not a GIS format but a way to show the contents of a map to people who have no GIS at all: the file opens on any office computer, in Google Sheets and in LibreOffice.
The export is for when map features have to be counted, sorted and handed around: a list of pharmacies in a district, a register of buildings with addresses, an inventory of green areas. A table is convenient for filtering, building pivots and pasting the result straight into a report.
The workbook has a separate sheet for each map layer, and the sheet name matches the layer name. A row is one feature: the columns are layer, name, type, then lon and lat (centroid coordinates in WGS84), then geometry_wkt with the full geometry in text form, and all the OpenStreetMap attributes.
The shape of lines and polygons is not lost — it sits in the geometry_wkt column, and QGIS or PostGIS will restore the whole feature from it. But working with that inside Excel itself is awkward: if you need cartography rather than a table, take GeoJSON or GeoPackage.
What Program Opens Excel Files
The following programs and applications can open, edit, and work with Excel XLSX (.xlsx) files exported from OSM2CDR:
Format specifications
- Open standard
- 2D only
- Lossless (no quality loss)
- Stores feature attributes
- Output: 1 file
- Microsoft Excel .xlsx (ISO 29500 OOXML). One sheet per layer, geometry as WKT column. Opens in Excel, LibreOffice, Google Sheets.
Who Uses Excel Maps
How to Export Excel
How to Open After Export
- Microsoft Excel, LibreOffice Calc, Google Sheets — open with a double click; the sheets correspond to map layers, and filters and pivot tables work as with any ordinary data.
- QGIS (free) — Layer → Add Vector Layer, choose the .xlsx and the sheet you need; or "Add Delimited Text Layer" if points from the lon and lat columns are enough.
- Python — pandas.read_excel("map.xlsx", sheet_name=None) reads all the sheets at once, and shapely.wkt.loads restores the geometry from the geometry_wkt column.
- CRM and record-keeping systems — most of them accept .xlsx import directly: map the name, type, lon and lat columns onto your own fields.
- If there are tens of thousands of features, Excel will start to lag: filter out unneeded layers at export time, or take CSV or GeoPackage instead.
Popular maps in Excel
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