A few months ago there was a discussion here about Quantum GIS.
So, being relatively (ok, substantially) ignorant about GIS data formats, I have a potential job in a county that has contour & planimetric data available online in a "personal geodatabase format". Can I use Quantum GIS to convert this into a shapefile so I can bring it into my cad software?
I'm no expert, but I have QGIS on my computer. I don't know.
Check the manual
http://qgis.org/en/documentation/manuals.html
Hey Jim
You can open a personal geodatabase in Quantum (under add vector data). Once you do that, you should be able to select the feature data set and export to shp, but I have not attempted it, but I suspect it wont be a problem.
Excellent, I'll give it a shot.
Can't get this kind of quick response on that crappy Professional Surveyor Magazine message board 😉
Could any of you post some screenshots of some of the work y'all have made using Quantum GIS? I was wondering how others are using it for "surveying" purposes.
Yes, you should be able to do that. The advantage of QGIS is that it is open-source and there are many programmers out there making plug-ins.
http://www.qgis.org/wiki/Python_Plugin_Repositories