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I’m creating a map to show the distribution of students in my school’s department. I have a .shp file from the US Census displaying zip code areas in the vector layer. Now I have an Excel spreadsheet that lists how many students are in each zip code per academic major. I was wondering if there was a straight forward way to create a vector layer displaying the appropriate number of points evenly distributed throughout each zip code. I tried to join the student data converted to a .cvs file to the Census zip code vector layer. But nothing appeared to have happened. Thanks.

user27894
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  • After joining the table to the zip code shapefile, can you see the CSV fields in the attribute table of the shapefile? If so, you just need to change the style of the layer now. If not, make sure the field you are joining with is the same type (string or integer). – evv_gis Mar 17 '14 at 19:13

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you might try using another format for your table, and check that the data type for the zip code is the same in both files (both long or double or string type). Assuming you are able to successfully join the files, you can use the 'random points' tool in qgis menu, research tools\random points. it gives you the option to set a stratified distribution, which you can manually control, or select a field from the attribute table (student count) to use to define the points per feature

TDavis
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