Displaying nearby locations as 1 point (QGIS 2.8 Wien)

Question

I am using an excel file to store all my locations and their attributes. This excel file contains coordinates of the same location measured on different dates. This means that the coordinates are not exactly the same for every locality visit. Is there a way that I can display these nearby locations as 1 single point?

To explain with an example: If I visit the zoo every weekend and save a coordinate of the zoo every time, the saved coordinates will not be exactly the same every time... Each weekend I add in my excell file what animals I have seen. Is it possible to show the zoo as one point (or one central coordinate) on my map and still show in the attribute list what animals I have seen during ALL of my trips and which animals I have seen at what date ?

Answer 1

If I understand you correctly where you have a group of points and you want them to be displayed as a single point, one method is to use the Point Displacement style. Here's a simple example focusing on 5 points with their associated attributes:

Let's go to Layer Properties > Style and change Single Symbol to Point Displacement, if left with default options, you might see something like this:

We can try and set it so that the group of points are only shown by a single point by playing around with the options. Firstly, we can change the renderer settings which contains the style for the outer points. Let's make this completely transparent:

Lastly, we can try and remove the lines (Circle color option) connecting the outer points (there was a post which mentioned about a possible feature in QGIS 2.12 which gives the option to make this transparent). At the moment, we can make this the same colour as the background:

Hopefully when all the settings have been applied, you will have a single point:

And if we select this point, their associated attributes should also be selected:

Hope this helps!