Converting Coordinate Systems and Vertical Datums
On occasion clients run entire projects only to find out that the deliverable was requested in a different coordinate system than what was used. Using the data gathered, Emlid Flow, and digital spreadsheet software, we can convert all of the data into the coordinate system that was requested in just a few steps.
First, we need to export the project as a CSV file. Open that exported file in your spreadsheet software (I am using google sheets). If you used Emlid Flow to gather the data your sheet should be formatted like this:
From the spreadsheet we will nullify the Northing, Easting, and Elevation values for our points.
We then will open a new project with the coordinate system we need the deliverable to be in and import our edited CSV file. The absent data will force Emlid Flow to use the Lat/Long & Ellipsoidal Height data and automatically convert the Northing, Easting, and Elevation data into our new coordinate system. When we export and open the new file we can see that the coordinates have successfully been converted.
This method can also be utilized with other software suites that are not formatted the same as Emlid Flow or to convert state plane coordinates that don’t have an associated latitude and longitude with an added step to manually format our points.
As you can see the format of these points is very different from our earlier project, we are only given coordinates from the incorrect system. We will need the lat/long coordinates to convert using the same method as before. The solution is to format our CSV file in the same manner as Emlid Flow being conscious of the Northing and Easting placements on the file. Using those points our manually formatted file looks like this:
We will then import this file into a new project on Emlid Flow using the same (incorrect) coordinate system it was gathered with. This will now force Emlid Flow to populate the lat/long and ellipsoidal height that we will need to convert it into the target coordinate system. We will then repeat the process from above to convert into our final correct coordinate system.