Building your own vector data

Start a new project in QGIS by either clicking Project | New, pressing Crtl + N, or clicking on the new project icon on the project toolbar. You will get a prompt if you wish to save the project; if you are following through this chapter, there is no need to save the project.

In a new project, scroll in the Browser window to the XYZ Tiles and expand the dropdown. In here, you will find OpenStreetMap:

Drag OpenStreetMap into the Layers window. The OpenStreetMap data will appear in the map view. Have a look in the bottom-right corner of the screen at the projection. This has changed to EPSG 3857 (Web Mercator) as this is the native projection of the OpenStreetMap data you have just loaded. Your screen should look similar to this:

Find the Alaska.shp that we used previously and load that into QGIS as well. Use the map navigation tools to zoom and pan to the data. The following diagram shows the data loaded together. The projection in the bottom-left corner has not changed, even though the projection of the alaska layer is different to the OpenStreetMap Tile. This is because QGIS 3.4 re-projects on the fly: