- Software: QGIS 3.20
- OS: Any
- Updated: October 2021
Occasionally you’ll run into e00 files. What are e00 files?
From ESRI: The Arc/Info interchange file format, also known as an export file (.e00), is used to enable a coverage, grid to TIN, and associated INFO tables to be transferred between different machines that are not connected by any type of file sharing network. Arc/Info interchange files have an .e00 extension.
So in essence it’s an older format from ESRI which usually was a coverage. You still occasionally run into them on different websites. They are worth your time to try to import if there is no newer data. So how does QGIS handle them? The easiest way to deal with it is to navigate to the directory that is holding the e00 file using the browser.
The e00 files generally have point, line, and polygon all wrapped up in one file (which is what the coverage model did). If you select the “vector” icon which is the .e00 file with a polygon (not the checkerboard raster icon) you can drag and drop that into QGIS. When you do you can add any of the components which essentially comes down to: ARC (linestring), LAB (point), CNT (point), PAL (polygon).
Adding all these in will give you data you can convert into the file format of you choice. The projection will most like be “UNKNOWN” which means you may need to do a bit of investigating on what projection you have and act accordingly.
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