When I join a table to a shapefile and then export it the titles of the columns are transformed to data1, data2

Question

I'm using QGIS 2.0.1

The table is in an excel format that i import through "add vector" and the shapefile is a polygone

I join the attributes by right clicking the polygone-->properties-->join Then once done if i look at the attributes table of the polygone everything is fine But when i do save as shapefile and add the new layer, all the data of the attribute table is there expect that the titles of the columns become data1, data2

Does anyone knows how to fix it? or maybe i'm doing something wrong?

Thanks

Answer 1

The .dbf of a shapefile has certain limits on the columns names, e.g. number of characters needs to be <11 characters, and that there cannot be spaces in the column names. I'm guessing when you export out to a new shapefile the function finds these errors and attempts to generate a valid column name.

Make sure your column names are shapefile friendly before performing the join.