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I wonder if anyone can advise me on how to go about adding .e00 data into my QGIS project.

I'd be very grateful for any advice, or a hint on where to find it.

Thanks TVZ

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1 Answer

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I assume you mean .e00, which is an ArcInfo ASCII Coverage format. In which case, QGIS can read this natively, so simply add it as a layer like any other vector format.

EDIT
An interchange file contains all coverage information and appropriate INFO table information in a fixed-length, ASCII format (from ESRI Help website)

The .e00 format can be compressed which is maybe why it appears to be binary in some cases. Also note that ESRI recommend using a binary format for a raster and not the .e00 format for efficiency.

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Thanks very much, MappaGnosis. I missed the "File type" dropdown, so it wasn't showing up. I'm a total amateur at this, attempting to be self-taught. For some reason this layer is very burdensome to my system. It takes about 15 seconds to redraw the screen every time I change views--much longer than any others. Could that have to do w/ the .eOO format? Is there anything I might do about that? (Here is the file, in case you care to look at it-- dropbox.com/s/jwom1kxzz68cwm9/slbehypl%20%281%29.e00 ) Thanks again, MappaGnosis! – TVZ Feb 6 at 14:57
The previous answer is not correct! The e00 format is a Workstation Arc/Info binary interchange format and not ASCII. Fortunately, because of GDAL, they are correct in that QGIS can read e00 if it contains a vector coverage. The caveat is that e00 files can also contain rasters. If the e00 contains a raster you may be in trouble because I am not aware of any software, other than Workstation Arc/Info that can unpack the data. – Jeffrey Evans Feb 6 at 17:16
@JeffreyEvans - My answer is correct. the ArcInfo Interchange format is ASCII. Please see the edit in my post. You will also note that QGIS refers to .e00 as being ASCII - corroborating ESRI's information. – MappaGnosis Feb 6 at 17:54
@user14838: the .e00 interchange format was only intended as an easy format to swap files between GIS software (I say 'was' as it is rather old). Your file is ASCII and therefore, I suspect that could be contributing to the slowdown as it must be interpreted every time. Have you tried converting it to another GIS format (PostGIS or even a shapefile). I can't guarantee that will help but I wouldn't normally recommend using an .e00 in the 'raw' other than to swap data. – MappaGnosis Feb 6 at 18:17
@user14838: I did a little test on your data. Converting to another format does appear to improve performance a bit, but you have a very detailed file. Simplifying the geometry will improve performance but will also impact quality. Since you file appears to be contour data, you would also need to be very careful that simplification doesn't result in crossing of contours. – MappaGnosis Feb 6 at 19:12
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