Sending Polls in Outlook 2007
Collecting responses from a group of people is something very common in an office environment. Whether you are trying to ask what type of pizza to order for a meeting, or taking a vote on who’s going to quit next, what you need is a poll.
What you might not realize is that if you are using Outlook 2007 and Exchange at work, you’ve got everything you need to send out a poll through email.
Compose a new email in Outlook, click the Options tab and select Use Voting Buttons. Here you can choose the defaults or create your own answers to the poll question.
If you select Custom just type in the answers you want to appear in the Use voting buttons field, separated by a semicolon.
Now you have the custom answers listed. That is all there is to it! Now send off your message.
When the recipient opens the email there will be a message advising them to respond by using the vote button which includes the custom responses.
After the recipient has made their choice a box will pop up verifying the poll response and an option to add additional information in the email.
When they respond you will have a flag on the email advising they have answered the poll … similar to a read receipt.
To view the totals of the poll, you can open up the original message in your sent message folder, and then click on the Tracking button. You’ll see a list of totals underneath the ribbon, and then a list below that of all the responses.
I can imagine plenty of possibilities for this feature in the office. What types of polls do you think would come in useful where you work?
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The problem with the Outlook polls is that they’re not very obvious (i.e., hidden above the message in a dropdown bar that doesn’t even look like it’s clickable). We had a poll running in our office last week and although I specifically said to use the voting buttons, we had a lot of ‘OK’ replies from people who didn’t get the voting thing. I think Outlook should make the buttons more obvious and not hide them behind a one click.
AL I totally agree with you on the look and feel of this option. I am looking into a way to improve the UI with this. I am sure all of our reader will have great ideas for this also!
This can be done exactly the same way in Outlook 2003 (it’s not a new feature of 2007).
Good article…but we need to analyze if we can disable Reply button when somebody receives a Poll. This will avoid people responding to the poll with a reply. I do think that it is possible with scripting.. but do not have time to dig in..
This does not seem to work when sending email across different exchange servers. I sent an email through my employer’s exchange server with Voting options to my client (reciepient on the client’s exchange server). Both me & my client use Outlook 2007, but he is not able to see the Voting buttons. The same happens when the client sends email with Voting buttons to me.
This does not work when sending email across exchange server. I sent an email through exchange server with Voting options (change to rich text format or not)and reciepient is on the same exchange 2003 server. I tried both Outlook 2007 to 2007 and Outlook 2003 to 2003, but i am not able to see the Voting buttons. I can see them when I view sent itoms, but receipient can not see voting buttons at all. Are the any setting in outlook or exchange server that we can change so it will work?