Using a LYR file in QGIS

I'm very excited about what I just did in a project in QGIS.

I needed to make this single-colored layer look like the multi-color layer below.

Single symbology on a North American layer.

EPA provided symbology on the same layer.

LYR files are ESRI layer styles, used with ArcGis. QGIS does not natively support this file type, but I needed some symbology provided by the EPA, which was of course a LYR file.

While I had tried using the SLYR plugin for QGIS before, I had been attempting to use a premium feature on the free version, so I had not yet been successful in using this plugin.

The feature I used today is included in the free version, which I was happy to learn. One thing I found about the SLYR plugin is it's not easy to find in the QGIS toolbar, but a search in the processing toolbox brought up the options I was looking for.

Here's a glimpse of what that looked like:

Searching for SLYR in the processing toolbox of QGIS

You can see there's a whole section of LYR dataset options, but the one I wound up using was "Convert LYR to QML." I saved the QML file in the project folder, because that made it easy for me to find. Then, it was a matter of opening the symbology properties, choosing the "style" option at the bottom, navigating to the correct file, and applying it to the layer.

Loading the converted style to the layer. Choosing "Load Style" then "Apply" are the next steps.

I'm really excited to continually add know-how to my QGIS knowledge, and I just had to share!