u/ChemistSalt1879

Hello everyone,

I am trying to make a gis workshop for my colleagues and one my colleague asked which formats are preferable to use?

Below follows my current understandings and experiences

Geopackage is an open standard and it's possible to have attributes that are longer than 10 characters and seems more useful than shapefiles in that regard.

Shapefiles are not preferable since you need several files. If you lose one of the files then you can't successfully import the shapefile. Another downside is that you can only have attributes with a maximum 10 character length like I mentioned above

Geosjson, I don't have much experience with it. Based on googling it appears that it's an open standard. I would not know if there are more benefits/downsides to using geosjson than other formats.

We also have CSV and Excel files and based on my experience, I would say it's fairly useful for points and at our organisation everyone has access to excel, so that's a big plus. However a big no for lines or polygons.

WFS and WMS are useful, since the source is for everyone the same and WFS/WMS is easily accessible.

Database connections seem also useful, however you can accidentally change the source which is not always expected and sometimes you don't want everyone to access databases

Based on my understandings I would assume that Geopackage, WFS/WMS would be mostly useful gis formats in qgis and if you only need points then also CSV files.

Please correct me if I am wrong