Voting in Outlook
Voting in Outlook
September 25, 2001
Outlook/Exchange has an interesting feature (called VOTING) that allows you to poll colleagues concerning an issue of some sort. To solicit votes you will need to compose an email message explaining the purpose of the poll and send the message to other Outlook users.
To understand voting let’s see what a message looks like for the receiver.
When one receives a message and displays it using the message view, there will be little to suggest that a voting response is being requested. As the originator of the message you need to alert your recipients through the subject of the message – for example—“Please use the VOTING Buttons in this message!”
So where are these “Voting Buttons?” Let’s take some standard views of this message. In “Auto Preview” we see an introductory line asking for a vote, but no way to vote.
With the “Preview Pane” we have all the information, but no voting buttons.
In order to vote open the message. The yellow banner above the “From” field asks for a reply using the voting buttons. The voting buttons are above the yellow banner. In our case the buttons give a list of candidates. Clicking on one of the buttons will register a vote for that candidate.
I’ll choose ‘Seldom Sally.’ Now I can use “Send the response now” or “Edit the response before sending.” The former simply sends the response, but, as you can see, the latter shows that the choice, “Seldom Sally,” has been added to the Subject line and allows us to add a note before sending.
Let’s go back now and compose an email with voting buttons. We have a list of recipients and we’ll use ‘Please use the VOTING BUTTONS in this message!’ as the subject. We might want to set a flag or “Importance.”
In the body we can go on to discuss the purpose of this poll and ask the recipient to vote.
(We’ll put ‘BE SURE TO VOTE USING THIS EMAIL MESSAGE!’ at the top)
Let’s add the voting option by using the Options menu–either through the “Options” button on the “Standard Toolbar” or click on “View”– then select “Options.”
Check the box by the “Use voting buttons” option.
We can enter choices separating each with a semicolon or we can select alternatives from this pull-down list.
Now send this email.
Now when somebody responds the subject line of their message will take the form of — Answer: Question where ‘Answer’ is the respondent’s choice and ‘Question’ is the ‘Subject’ in the original email.
To ease the burden of sorting through all the responses Outlook provides a tally. You’ll find this tally in the original email in ‘Sent Items.’
Notice the two tabs “Message” and “Tracking.” The ‘Message’ tab displays the original sent message. The ‘Tracking’ tab displays the tally.
At the top, in the yellow area, you’ll find the ‘Reply Totals.’ Below that you’ll find a list of respondents along with each individuals response and the time of that response. If you keep this ‘Tracking’ window displayed while people are responding, you’ll see the votes coming in—that is, you don’t have to open the individual responses in order to have the votes tallied.
That’s it for the voting feature of Outlook. Please let us hear any comments or questions you have. You can access this or any previous tip at the website shown below. Thank you for your attention.
