Uploading a CSV with coordinates

If your spreadsheet has latitude and longitude columns, you can turn it into a mapped data layer without renaming anything first. Drop the file onto the New Data Layer page and the ingest service figures out which columns are the coordinates and which are the attributes.

How the detection works

When you upload a .csv, .tsv, or .txt file, the server scans the column headers and the first few rows looking for a latitude / longitude pair. It matches against a vocabulary of common names:

• Latitude side: lat, latitude, latitude_decimal, lat_dd, y, y_coord, northing, point_y.
• Longitude side: lng, lon, long, longitude, longitude_decimal, lon_dd, x, x_coord, easting, point_x.

Capitalization doesn't matter. Underscores, dots, and spaces in column names are ignored for matching ("Lat (decimal)" matches "lat").

After identifying a candidate pair, the server validates that the column values actually look like coordinates:

• Latitudes between -90 and 90.
• Longitudes between -180 and 180.
• A majority of the sampled rows have valid numeric values in both columns.

If the candidate pair fails the value check, it's discarded and the next candidate is tried. If no pair survives, the upload falls through to the general ingest path and you'll need to map columns by hand.

Files we already handle

• Comma-delimited (,) — the standard CSV.
• Tab-delimited (\t) — common from spreadsheet "Save as TSV" or pasted from a wiki table.
• Semicolon-delimited (;) — common in European Excel exports.
• UTF-8 BOM at the start of the file is tolerated.
• European decimal commas like 40,7 are recognized when the file uses semicolons as delimiters (so the comma in the value isn't confused with the field separator).

When it falls back

The smart-detection path bails out cleanly in these cases, and the upload proceeds as an attribute-only or geometry-from- WKT layer:

• No columns matched the latitude / longitude vocabulary.
• Values that looked like coordinates were actually UTM eastings / northings (out of the WGS84 lat/lng range).
• The file had no parseable data rows.

In those cases the existing geospatial driver kicks in. If your file has a geometry column with WKT or a .shp / .gpkg / .kml / etc. sibling, that path will pick the geometry up.

Tips for a smooth upload

• Use simple column names when you control the source file. lat and lng always work and read clearly in the attribute table later.
• Numeric coordinates should be decimal degrees, not degrees-minutes-seconds.
• If your spreadsheet exports with quoted fields, that's fine — the parser handles "40.7","Site name with, comma".

What happens next

Once the layer ingests, it appears as a new data layer item you own. Drop it onto any map to render it as a point layer with all the other columns available as attributes.