Anyone that went to the inaugural Scottish QGIS UK user group meet would not only have had a great time & enjoyed the great company of Ross & Thinkwhere but would have also seen Neil Bennys’ presentation “Qgis Evangelism” which I only just caught a couple of days ago. Neil is a geoninja of the highest order, he sneaked in a little slide showing a tool for ArcGIS called Mxd2Qgs…

Over the last 6yrs of using both ArcGIS & Qgis alongside one another, the thought of a tool that could translate the MXDs is a godsend, I have been asked so many times by clients and other consultants whether this holy grail existed (in a working format) that I was ACTUALLY thinking of building one….so after seeing the presentation I got straight onto Lutra Consulting….then realised I got it completely wrong and got onto ThinkWhere!

Although the website which I was given was in Italian, it wasn’t too much effort to translate, below is the blog in English:

There is a little tool for ArcGIS created by Allan Maungu that lets you convert a project file format. Mxd owner of the software ESRI format. Qgs use with Quantum GIS. https://sites.google.com/site/lumtegis/files/Mxd2Qgs.zip As is known, the project file. Mxd contains no data in it but only the links to any Shapefile, GeoTIFF and other datasets with their display settings. The installation of the tool is pretty simple.



Once you have extracted the contents of the file. Zip need to install the Python library launching the application. Exe file inside the unzipped folder.

Then we start ArcMap (guaranteed compatibility with ArcGIS 10 and later) with a right-click of the mouse & select “Add Toolbox …”

From the next window we reach the path where the file is located just unzipped “Z_ArcMap to ” and click on “Open” to add it to our ArcToolbox.

Finally right-click on the new tool “Z_ArcMap to QGS> ArcMap to Quantum GIS” and select “Properties” to indicate the location of the script “mxd2qgs.py,” also from the unzipped file. Downloaded zip.

Although its use is immediate, there is no need to set any parameters except of course the destination of the output file.

In a test carried out on a project of large size with considerable complexity and number of processing on the data, the operation of the toolbox has not been completed.

With a simpler design, there were no problems.

Nick D