The Gazetteer of British Columbia is a spreadsheet of all official place names, including feature type, feature code, mapsheet, and latitude & longitude. The Gazetteer is extracted from the BC Geographical Names Information System (BCGNIS), the master database of British Columbia place names. The BC Gazetteer is available as a zipped SHP file, CSV or XLSX. See also BC Geographical Names (https://catalogue.data.gov.bc.ca/dataset/43805524-4add-4474-ad53-1a985930f352) dataset for other formats and download options. **Some software (including MS Excel) may assume the wrong encoding when the .csv file is opened**, and this can cause names with special characters to be presented incorrectly. With whatever software you use to open the .csv file, it is recommended to open the file in a way that explicitly acknowledges the UTF-8 character encoding. Alternatively, **the Gazetteer is also available in .xlsx format which is recommended for MS Excel users** because it will automatically recognize the correct character encoding.