On my previous tutorial, I’ve shown you how to open a Shapefile (.shp) in Mapinfo using standard open file menu. This method requires Mapinfo to be installed first. But how can we open or view a Shapefile without Mapinfo? Don’t worry, there are many Shapefile viewer out there. And here I want to discuss a bit about Shapeviewer 1.2, a simple Shapefile viewer for Windows. Shapeviewer is a very simple program develop using VB and it works on my Windows 7.
Shapeviewer 1.2 is available for free. You can download this great application from here. Extract the archive and then run the shapeviewer.exe application inside it. To use it, simply browse the .shp file using left panel browse menu. The interface of this application is a bit outdated but I don’t think its a problem. There only three main tools on this program, zoom in, zoom out and zoom to extend. This application runs directly from a binary file and does not need to be installed.
This application can also be used to extract and export the shp coordinates into excel file. Its a useful as well if we want to extract the coordinate information on a shapefile.
