Insights about project management, GIS, and how technology is transforming industries operating in the physical world.
A KML coordinate pair is longitude first, latitude second, in WGS 84, always — and a Brazilian pair written the other way round leaves the continent with no warning at all. Both viewers count the point, draw it and export it. Here is the tell you can read by eye, and why no tool finds it for you.
An easting and a northing are metres inside a 6-degree zone, so without the zone number and hemisphere letter they are not a location. Read one zone over and the pair lands 611 km away; type the wrong hemisphere letter on a Brazilian zone north of the equator and it lands in Antarctica, silently.
A point at (0, 0) is not a place your data came from — it is a coordinate that went missing, got swapped, or was read from the wrong column. Four failures, each reproduced in the csv-viewer and the coordinate-converter, with any message the tool shows, the distance it costs, and the fix.
Nine degrees-minutes-seconds forms through the coordinate converter, measured: which parse, which come back as DMS format not recognized., and which are accepted and still wrong. Plus the spreadsheet formula that fails silently, GDAL exiting 0 with no points, and one DMS cell in the csv-viewer.
Three columns, lat and lon, dropped into the csv-viewer — that is the clean case. This post covers the others: the decimal comma Excel pt-BR writes, a title row that shreds every line, swapped columns that draw silently in the wrong ocean, DMS, UTM and Latin-1 — what the viewer shows, and the fix.
SIRGAS 2000 and WGS 84 are the same place to within a metre, and PROJ transforms between them with a no-op. The pair that moves your data is the legacy one: at Brasília SAD 69 sits 68.530 m from SIRGAS 2000 via EPSG:15485, and at Belo Horizonte Córrego Alegre sits 41.711 m away via EPSG:6193.
SIRGAS 2000, SAD69, Corrego Alegre, MAGNA-SIRGAS, POSGAR 2007 — every code here was read out of GDAL 3.13.3 on 11 September 2026, not from memory. Which UTM zone covers which Brazilian state, why a distance measured in EPSG:3857 runs 9% long at São Paulo, and how to convert.