How to open CSV File on Global Mapper 18.0

Hello everyone, welcome to Free GIS Tutorial website. This is our first article on this blog. I am going to start with Global Mapper. You may have data in CSV (Comma separated text file) and want to open it on Global Mapper. Well, Global Mapper is a powerful software that can handle many types of files. On this article, I am going to show you how to open CSV file on Global Mapper. I am using Global Mapper version 18.2.

What is CSV?

Before we go through, you may want to take a look at the following explanation about what is CSV file. A CSV is a comma-separated file format which allows data to be saved in a table structured format. CSV files can be used with any spreadsheet program, such as Microsoft Excel, Open Office Calc, or Google Spreadsheets. They differ from other spreadsheet file types in that you can only have a single sheet in a file, they can not save cell, column, or row styling, and cannot save formulas. Source

Steps to open CSV file on Global Mapper

At this point, I assume you have .csv file in hands which contains easting (x), and northing (y) information. Please note that you must put the coordinate information (X,Y) in the first and second column. Otherwise, Global Mapper will return error when trying to open it. Here is my CSV file structure:

As you can see, the first two column is the coordinate information. Make sure you put the coordinate information like mine.

Open CSV File

From Global Mapper main window, go to File Open Data File (s). Browse to the folder where you save the csv file. Don’t forget to change the file of types to CSV. See illustration below.

Next, a new ASCII Import window will open. We can configure many things here.

On the Import type, select the appropriate type. In this example, I use point only since my data contains points only. Click OK to start the process. In some cases, Global Mapper cannot detect the projection of the file.

Don’t worry, we will configure it later. Click OK to continue. Then, specify the projection.

Once you specify the correct projection, click OK and your data should be visible by now.

At this point, we have successfully import/open CSV file on Global Mapper. Thanks for reading this post. Please leave us comments if you have any queries.