Adding a column to an attribute table leaves edit pencil icon grayed out in QGIS?

Question

How do I add a column to an attribute table?

When I open up the attribute table I'm unable to click the edit pencil because it's grayed out?

Ultimately, I'm trying to transfer data in a column I have in Excel into this zoning shapefile.

I tried searching for a solution to this issue but wasn't able to find anything.

Answer 1

QGIS, or more specifically OGR, has two different drivers for XLS and XLSX (see http://www.gdal.org/ogr_formats.html)

XLSX can be edited, XLS can not.

Try converting your data to XLSX and you should be able to edit the dataset in QGIS afterwards.