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.