Correct Incorrect Projection of Imported Shapefile into Excel PowerMap

Question

Update 2

Below are the steps I re-projected shapefile. For some reason it disappears.

In QGIS double-click on shapefile

Right-click and select Set Layer CRS

Select WGS 84

Click OK

Right-click shapefile and select "Save As"

Create new subdirectory to save new shapefile

Click OK in Save Vector Layer

I uncheck the original shapefile and the new shapefile is blank

Update 1

Still struggling, found some clues.

This website, Power Map for Excel gives simple example and links to the Excel spreadsheet and shapefile. When I plug it in, it looks correct.

I went back to my original shapefile and it is plotting the boroughs of New York City across the world.

In QGIS the shapefile looks like this

But when I import into Excel Power Maps it looks like the following.

How to correct this? They are all points on a map instead of shapes AND they are all in the wrong place!

Staten Island in the North Pole

Bronx is South of South Africa

Queens is in the Indian Ocean

Brooklyn is North of the Philippines

Manhattan is North of Indonesia

Original Question

I am very novice at shapefiles and cartography in general.

Finally found a shapefile (shapefile is under Borough Boundaries & Community Districts called "Borough Boundaries Clipped to Shorelines") that does not give errors when I import into Excel 2016 Power Map

I am not sure how to use Shapefile that I successfully imported.

I googled and searched for YouTube. YouTube only shows animation of completed maps, not a how-to.

And the book High Impact Data Visualization in Excel with Power View, 3D Maps, Get & Transform and Power BI, 2nd Edition (free download at allitebooks) gives one or two sentences, not even a tutorial on how to import for use!

Here are the steps, perhaps you will understand

I opened Excel 2016 Power Map > Clicked on Custom Regions

Click on Import New Set

Select BoroName

Click on Import

Map view defaults to the Indian subcontinent, which I find odd because the shapefile is 5 boroughs of New York

I attempt to add a field from my data whose name is BOROUGH. Entire dataset can be downloaded from NYS Open Data

Then I add Custom Region Set and nothing happens.

What am I supposed to do next?

Answer 1

I think you're not quite getting the reprojection right. You've got the right steps, just not the right options.

In the shapefile properties, when you pick Set Layer CRS you need to set the spatial reference to what the layer is, not what you want it to be. For this data it looks like it is EPSG:2263. This is easy to misinterpret - the command intends to set the CRS of the QGIS Layer, not the data file it is drawing. It's usually used when the spatial reference isn't defined in the source data so QGIS can't automatically determine which one to use.

Then when you go to Save As.., this is where you set it to EPSG:4326. This will reproject the data.

The reason it's not working is that when you Set Layer CRS to EPSG:4326 you're assigning the wrong coordinate system and QGIS is accepting what you tell it. Then when you Save As.. and pick EPSG:4326 here too QGIS thinks you're saving to the same coordinate system so it just uses the same coordinates. It then assigns the shapefile to that coordinate system, but the numbers don't make any sense.