QGIS Underground Utility Mapping — A Practical Setup Guide for Infrastructure Teams
Most municipalities and utility contractors have their underground infrastructure documented somewhere — in CAD as-built drawings, in PDFs, in someone’s head. Getting it into a proper GIS layer is the difference between calling 811 and hoping versus knowing where a 6-inch water main runs before you start excavating. QGIS handles this well. It’s free, it imports CAD files, and it exports GeoPDF files that field crews can use offline on a tablet. The setup isn’t complicated, but there are decisions you need to make before you start drawing — particularly around file format, CRS, and attribute schema — that determine whether the data is useful for the next 20 years or becomes another file nobody trusts. ...