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I am trying to convert from decimal degrees to meters in QGIS. I have a shapefile that is currently in WGS84/UTM zone 19S. I have tried the save as - browse - WGS84 EPSG:4326 but this appears:

Export to vector file failed. Error: creation of data source failed (OGR error:Failed to create directory .shp for shapefile datastore.)

Does anybody have any ideas? Or any other way of doing it?

I am using QGIS 2.2.0

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  • Hmmm, I just did a quick test and was able to save just fine from 19S to WGS84. Perhaps you need to check the directory and name of the new shapefile?
    – evv_gis
    Commented Apr 16, 2014 at 17:08

2 Answers 2

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You did not specify a file name for the export.

In that case, QGIS tries to add ".shp" to a blank file name, which causes the error message you get.

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  • I'm sorry i'm new to QGIS. What you you mean by the file name. Can you give me an example of what I should put?
    – Katie C
    Commented Apr 16, 2014 at 20:15
  • If you mean just title it it still doesn't seem to work. I put meter so it would save meter.shp and still the same message.
    – Katie C
    Commented Apr 16, 2014 at 20:50
  • You have to use the "Browse" next to the filename field to select the folder where the file should be written to.
    – AndreJ
    Commented Apr 17, 2014 at 4:11
  • OK got it, thanks. The reason for doing this was so that I could read the x and y co ordinates as meters. However, when I use the identify features button it still reads them in decimal degrees. Any idea what i've done wrong. Thanks for your help.
    – Katie C
    Commented Apr 17, 2014 at 7:06
  • A shapefile in UTM should have coordinates in metres, while EPSG:4326 sould have degrees. Note that coordinates are independent from values written in the attribute table.
    – AndreJ
    Commented Apr 17, 2014 at 7:51
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I guess your orijinal data is not in UTM. Becuse your file need to be in meters in such case. Utm is in meter originally you need to check your initial datum. When you transform to wgs84 it will still be in degrees.

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