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I produced an excel file with the historical solar radiation of Australia (the file has 679 rows and 839 column and the filled cells have the shape of Australia). How can I link the cells in the excel files to a pixel on my map? enter image description here

M. keller
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    Well errr, if it's not a joke, this look like an extreme commando mission to recover really strangely stored data. What is you goal exactly? Convert the data to a more standard raster grid and/or publish a map. And if so which mapping tool have you in mind? – MarHoff Feb 04 '16 at 16:38

2 Answers2

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You basically have an array. I would export this from excel as a space separated ascii file. This will result in what is essentially an ESRI ASCII raster without a header. You can then open this file in a text editor (with word wrap turned off!!!) and add the header as the first few lines. The basic, required, header information contains: the number of rows and columns, the origin [X,Y] coordinates of the lower left corner of the array (to provide a geographic reference), the cell size and the no data value. 

NCOLS 839
NROWS 679
XLLCORNER xxx
YLLCORNER xxx
CELLSIZE xxx
NODATA_VALUE xxx

This is a fairly standard raster format and can be imported into any GIS software. If you do not understand this answer, I would imagine that it is time to find some help from somebody familiar with spatial analysis.

Jeffrey Evans
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I think you need to arrange your Excel file differently - create 3 columns, for X coordinates, Y coordinates, and the final column for the historical solar radiation. You can then load this into QGIS/ArcGIS, and it will then get mapped properly. GIS software can read coordinates, but doesn't interpret a shape you create in Excel.

Annekatrien Debien
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  • Chicken before the egg. If you have any array of values, organized in rows and columns, exactly how do you get [X,Y] coordinates for each cell? You would need to get the array into a raster format before you could export the data into [X,Y,Z] triplicates. – Jeffrey Evans Feb 04 '16 at 17:26