Exporting interviews offline on Android tablet

Help & Support
1

Hello, I am testing out a survey protocol which will be rolled out using Interviewer on Android tablets in a location with limited internet connectivity. Because of the snowball sampling strategy we are using the interviewers still need to be able to regularly view the CSV file outputs of a given series of interviews regularly. When the interviews are exported to CSV, however, the only options are to export to Google Drive, Bluetooth, or Gmail, all of which require either another device or some kind of connection. Is there some way to allow files to be exported to different file managers or to an external device connected to the tablet, or does anyone have some idea of a workaround for this? Thank you very much.

EDIT: I do already have another file management software downloaded, including Files by Google, as is recommended in the manual. It just doesn’t appear as an option when I am exporting.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Tried on a different tablet and same issue so this may be a bug, as it seems to be an issue with Network Canvas recognizing file apps.

ANOTHER ANOTHER UPDATE: I tried non-Google file manager apps and these do seem to appear as options to share to. Now even more confused about whether this is an application issue or a problem on Android’s end, but it would seem that having to use a third-party file manager is less than ideal, especially when the data you are handling is sensitive, so this may still be worth looking into.

2

Hello!

Unfortunately, we can’t control the way that Android determines that a given app is capable of handling a user “intent” (the name used to refer to an action such as saving a file). We can only say “the user has a ZIP file they would like to share - please present the apps that can handle this”. When we wrote the documentation, the “files by google” app was working for this use-case - sorry to hear that it sounds like it isn’t now! A change to the app or the operating system could have caused that.

Do you mind sharing which app worked, so that we can update the documentation?

3

Yes, I figured this may be the case but thought I would check.

I got several other file management apps to work other than Files by Google, but the one that seemed most reliable was Solid Explorer, which has a free version and a paid one (I don’t think it should matter which version you are using for this purpose).

1 Like
4

Thanks for the tip. I’ve updated the documentation to suggest this app.