Getting data out of CDF-player

Question

For my Skeptics working group I wrote a program in Mathematica to test a dowser's ability to assess the status of persons shown to them by means of photographs. For a null measurement I distributed this document to my group's members in CDF form (the new v8 Computable Document Format, meant to be run with the CDF-player). On my computer (using mma) it all works fine, but the others can't export the data (the program does an export to an Excel file). On reading the fine print I see that the player doesn't support Export. So my question is:

Is there any way to get data out of CDF-player?

Answer 1

For understandable reasons, the math/CDF player is severely limited in both input and output.

However, Print works, so you could print in TableForm - which produces a TSV - then copy/paste it into Gnumeric ('cause why would you use Excel?!).

I just tested this in both Gnumeric and OpenOffice and it worked fine.

Put the following code into a CDF document to test.

Button["Press me!", Print[TableForm[RandomReal[{0, 1}, {10, 10}]]]]

Note that you can't edit the Input, but you can press the button and copy the output. Skeptics groups are normally fairly technically competent people, this should probably be a workable solution...

Answer 2

I thought that I could encode my data in a picture which I then would have the group members copy from the CDF document and email to me. It looked something like this:

The top row to define the data slots and the bottom row contains the data encoded as color. However, I found that Outlook compresses pictures placed in an email body, so you get slightly blurred pictures, and hence corrupted data. The next step was to use a more robust code like the QR barcode. Luckily, since last week Wolfram|Alpha is able to generate QR barcodes, like so:

WolframAlpha[
 "QRcode:\"" <> ToString[N[Pi, 100]] <> "\"", {{"QRCodeBarcode", 1}, 
  "Content"}]

I have now downloaded and installed the CDF-player myself and it seemed to work in a CDF document as well, though I had to generate the QR code a second time, before it handled the internet connection correctly. Don't know whether this is a spurious result.