Basic features
Ádám T. Kocsis 
GPlates comes with a lot of example data that helps you better understand how the program works. These data can be loaded as feature collections.
Loading feature collections
New feature collections can be loaded by Clicking File->Open Feature Collection….
This will open up a dialogue window that lets you select files to load. By default it will open up in a directory, where example data are located.
Note that there is a folder called GeoData, which includes all the example data that comes bundled with GPLates. Let’s load a feature collection! In this dialogue window navigate to GeoData/FeatureCollections/Coastlines. You should see the following files
Note in the bottom right corner the extension that the file opening explorer window is searching for: all loadable files(*.gpml etc.). These are all the different GPlates-native file formats. If you see *.proj here, that means that you have clicked on Open Project instead. Projects are current states of the GPlates application, with which you can continue working from where you have left off, wheras Feature collections are the individual data that you can import into the program.
You open a Feature collection by double clcking on it. Let’s open Global_EarthByte_GPlates_PresentDay_Coastlines_Polyline.gpmlz!
Loading the feature collection will inflict two changes: 1. You will see a map appearing in the reconstruction view, and 2. the Layers window will pop up. Note that the projection in set to Mollweide!
Inspecting features
The loaded map displays coastline segments with different colors, which is even more apparent, when you zoom into the map.
You can use the Inspect features tool to find out more about these individual segments. This tool is the second symbol in the tools at the right hand side.
Then you can click on the individual segments to select them. Note that the selected segment will turn white. In this case this is the Atlantic coast of the Iberian peninsula.
When you click on a feature, the right-hand panel under Current feature will display details of the currently active feature. Among many attributes, features have Names, in this case this is “Iberia”. They also have a PlateID, which in this case is 304. But why are they colored? It will make more sense if we load in another feature.
Loading a second set of features
You can load in as many features as you want by going to File->Open Feature Collection…, as before.
It is likely that the dialogue window will pop up where you opened the previous file. Let’s go back to the FeatureCollections folder and go into ContientalPolygons from there.
Here open up the only file: Global_EarthByte_GPlates_PresentDay_ContinentalPolygons.gpmlz!
After loading, the map will change again, and a new entry will be added to the Layers window.
This second feature, iincludes outline polyongs of the continental plates. You can inspect them similarly as the coastline segments. Clicking on the outlines of the polygon surranding the main part of the Iberian peninsula (red), will highlight the entire polyong as white. Its name is also Iberia and its Plate ID is also 304.
What you see is how the underlying continental polygons partition the present-day coastline. If you select any of the coastline segments, you will see that the surrounding polygons will also have the same colors, and they will have the same Plate ID. As a matter of fact, the colors are selected to indicate the Plate ID. These are very important: the movement of the plates are described by referring to their Plate IDs.
The Layers window
The layers window is used to organize feature collections and to tidy up your workspace. You can always turn the Layers window on and off by going to Window->Show Layers in the top menu, which can be handy in case you lose it.
Note that the window can also be minimized by clicking on the minimize bar in the top right corner of the window, and then the window will be minimized to the the taskbar of GPlates.
If you lose the Layers window, be sure to check it there! You can always expand this by clicking on the icon to restore the window.
You can turn on the visibility of individual Feature collections (layers) by clicking on the little eyes. This is what the polygons themselves look like, if you turn the coastline polyine invisible: