So I have a whole pile of stuff to talk about – the first being a QGIS plugin you might find useful. It’s been a quotable 2013 – one the comments I’ve gotten is “I can’t do this because I don’t have the right software”. Our reply this year has grown (thanks to a lot of different adventures) into “you need more GIS tools in your toolbox”. Here’s another tool for you if you’re awesome enough to have QGIS in your toolbox.
I’ve been exploring plugins in QGIS – and I have a fantasy of actually writing one. If you don’t know what plugins are – first off they are awesome. If you have an itch to scratch you can extend the functionality of QGIS through plugins. One of the plugins I’ve been using is Group Stats.
What does Group Stats do? Well – for those of you who have known the joy of generating a frequency table in ArcGIS, that’s exactly what Group Stats does – it provides a way to generate statistics on your data. Today I’ve been working with a lot of forestry data. I opened Group Stats and start generating statistics: For instance I need to know how many acres are spread across all of my stands of trees. For fun I summed all the acres. I drag the field acres and the function “sum” into the value box and then calculate. 
I now want to know how that breaks down by county so I drag the county field into the row section.
I now know how this breaks down by county and I can see I have a problem: I have some data with no county attributes. I add the name of the property into the rows section and it gives me the data that is missing a county name. I can even select rows and columns and have that selection reflected in the display.
Simple. Effective. It works quite well. I’ve gotten a better look at my data and if needed I can start providing spreadsheets to clients/coworkers. Another great tool to look at your data
