The event visualisation plugin for QGIS is a way of adding tabular geographic data to QGIS in a similar way to the “add XY data from table” option in ArcGIS. I’ve only tried the windows version so far but it is cross-platform. You download it from here Extract the zip file and move the files to the following locations: Copy plugins/libevis.dll to C:\Program Files\Quantum GIS\plugins Copy the imageformats folder to C:\Program Files\Quantum GIS