How to use field calculator in QGIS to calculate new coordinates, and use that new columm to geolocate a layer's points

Question

In a separate question, at How to shift a CRS by an observed offset,

I asked about shifting a CRS to align the problems aligning data points with a satellite image obtained from OpenLayers. (They were off by 20 feet, more or less, way larger than the data collection accuracy for the points)

One suggestion was to use the field calculator for the layer. The layer has three original columns: text, lat and long.

I used that calculator to create a (virtual) field, making the adjustment for the observed offset of .0000125 longitude

Having done that, how do I force QGIS to use the new column to geolocate the points, in lieu of the original longitude column?

Is the only way to overwrite the original data column, making sure to preserve the original data somewhere? I assumed (hoped) that there was some method that says to QGIS: "Use -this- column as a coordinate" -- does it not exist, or am I missing something...?

Answer 1

Since you mentioned in the prev question that your input file is a Shapefile, it should be noted that QGIS is not using the data in the attribute table at all! Instead it reads the coordinates from the .shp binary file part. You can use affine transformation to move the geometries.

https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/affine-transformation+qgis