Thursday, March 03, 2011

Outlook: Voting Buttons

Amplify’d from blogs.office.com
Outlook: Voting Buttons

Voting buttons are a great way to quickly and easily get answers for any question you may have. In the example below I’ll show you how I picked the best day to go see a Seattle Sounders FC soccer game with my coworkers.

Creating a message with voting options

1. Launch a new e-mail window

The first step is to create a new e-mail message and click on the Use Voting Buttons button in the Options tab in the ribbon. Use Voting Buttons drop-down

2. Choose template choices or create your own

While there are 3 default options that work for a variety of questions, using a custom set of voting answers will be more appropriate for choosing a date for a soccer game. Click the Custom… entry item to enter your own.

3. Add your custom choices

In this dialog you need to type your choices into the textbox by separating them with a semicolon (;).

For this example I wanted my coworkers to choose from the 3 available game dates of May 30th, June 13th and June 17th which appear as “May 30th; June 13th; June 17th" in the Message Options dialog.

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Then when you are finished click the Close button.

5. Confirm your choices

Congratulations, you have just created voting buttons! To confirm the choices that the recipients will be able to choose from go back to the Options tab and click on the Use Voting Buttons button again to see your custom choices. clip_image006

6. Send your e-mail

Now that you have confirmed your choices, fill in the rest of your e-mail (recipients, subject, body, etc.) and send the message!

7. Check the responses

The responses will show up as new items in your Inbox as the recipients vote – this is very similar to seeing Accept and Decline responses for meeting requests. clip_image008

8. Check the results 

You can look at the running tally of responses by clicking on the blue message bar in any of the response e-mails and choosing View voting responses. clip_image010

 

This will launch a new window where you can see the total number a votes as well as a list of individual responses. clip_image012

We hope that you find using Voting buttons useful and as always, feel free to post a comment and tell us how you use Voting Buttons.

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