I have downloaded an excel data sheet of identified plants for a location and I’m having trouble importing them into a visualisation or CAD software (any will do and I have tried QGIS, AutoCAD, and Rhino). I have simplified the excel to just lat, long, and species and am just trying to place the points on my own map. I have been able to somewhat successfully do this in AutoCAD but the points all came in in the same spot, which makes me thing maybe there’s something wrong with the latitudes and longitudes that have been originally exported.
Has anyone successfully done this before?
Without more info it sounds like you may be using a basemap in UTM coordinates (or similar) and then are trying to add decimal degree point coordinates. If the data columns for lat and lon have different numbers then it’s not a data issue that is causing all points to be plotted in the same spot. You have to ensure that your coordinate reference systems are the same and converted properly.
I’m not sure if this is equivalent to your needs, but I often need to import points to either Google Earth or GaiaGPS. I save my spreadsheet as a .cvs file, use https://www.convertcsv.com/csv-to-kml.htm to convert it to a .kml file, and then drag and drop it in. The points all come out in the right places, and the whole process takes about three minutes.