I have a shapefile of counties in the US, and I would like to calculate the area of each polygon so that I can run a population density calculation. However, I am having trouble calculating the areas.
My steps were:
Vector
-> Geometry Tools
-> Export/Add Geometry Columns
I set the input layer
to the layer I wanted to add the geometry columns to, then set Calculate using
to "Layer CRS" (which is NAD83, EPSG:4269). My understanding was that it would then calculate the area in meters since NAD83 is in meters, but the values are too low to make sense (i.e. 0.2 area for a whole county).