We are going to continue with the course about introduction to GIS with Game of Thrones. At this post we are going to review the alphanumeric editing tools. Using the “Political” layer, that contains the kingdoms of the continent called “Westeros”, we are going to complete the original alphanumeric information with the sentence of the reigning house and two fields that will allow us to see (in a next post) how the “Hyperlink” tool works.

Are you ready?

Once we have opened our project, we put the “Political” layer active and we open its attribute table, such as we saw in the “Tables” post. This table contains 3 fields: id, name (name of the kingdom) and ClaimedBy. We are going to start editing now and add three additional fields.

To start editing we are going to access to the “Table/Start editing” menu or we press the corresponding button:

If you have the View visible, you will see that the name of the layer (“Political”) is in red colour now, that indicates that the layer is in editing mode.

We are going to add the three columns, one by one. There are several ways to do it, and we are going to see the easiest one, using the tool of the “Table/Add column” menu or from its corresponding button:

When we press the button a new window will appear where we can define: field name, type, length (maximum number of characters), precision, (only for numeric fields) and value by default (this is optional, cells will be empty if we don’t write anything here).

The values of the new three fields to create will be:

• Name: Words, Type: String, Length: 50
• Name: Shield, Type: String, Length: 100
• Name: Web, Type: String, Length: 100

Once the three fields are added our table will be like this one:

Now we can start to fill in the cells with the data of each one. For that we only have to double-click on the corresponding cell and start to write. We will fill in the cells then.

For “Words” field we will add the next sentences for each of the reigning houses:

• Tully: “Family, Duty, Honor”

• Stark: “Winter is Coming”

• Greyhoy: “What Is Dead May Never Die”

• Martell: “Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken”

• Baratheon: “Ours is the Fury”

• Arryn: “As High as Honor”

• Lannister: “A Lannister Always Pays His Debts”

• Targaryen: “Fire and Blood”

• Tyrell: “Growing Strong”

Results will be similar to these ones:

As we have spoken about, we work with the other two fields in a next post related to hyperlinks. So we finish editing mode of the table from the “Table/Stop editing” or from its corresponding button:

Before finishing it’s important to tell that there’s a tool that allows us to edit the alphanumeric values of a layer from the View directly. Sometimes it can help us to save time in our updating data tasks.

To check it, from our View and with “Political” layer activated, we press on the “Attribute editor” button:

To use it we press on the element to edit and a new window will be opened with its alphanumeric attributes, that we can modify.

Test it and check its working. To finish it you have to press “Finish editing” button at that window.

See you at the next posts to continue learning…