Why Outlook gets my vote

Few people make good use of Oulook's 'Voting' feature in their emails but it's one of the simplest and most handy collaboration tools around. You have to be using a Microsoft Exchange Server email account for this to work but everything else is baked right into the products.

Here's how it works. When creating your email, click on the Options... button on the main toolbar (no, not the Options menu item in the Tools menu!). Now in the Voting and Tracking options section, select the 'Use voting buttons' box then edit the text in the adjoining box. You can enter whatever you like here, as long as each voting option is separated by a semicolon (;).

So, for example, if you're sending a email to colleagues trying to find out who would like to see your holiday photos ;-) you could use a simple Yes;No;I'd rather stick pins in my eyes voting option. Or, if you have a number of different options, like wanting to know what drink people would like you to buy for them as a bribe to get them to attend your Immensely Dull Project Update Meeting, you could use something like Latte;Capuccino;Espresso;Americano;Beer;Cognac;Bottle of Cognac. You get the idea.

Now when you send the email, Outlook adds a voting bar at the top of the email when it reaches the recipient. They can then simply click on the option they like and Outlook automatically responds to you with their 'vote'.

Where voting really comes into its own is when Outlook does the hard work of counting the responses for you. To see how many votes have been cast for each option, open the original message (normally in your Sent Items folder) and click the Tracking tab. With a little cut'n'paste magic you could even export the votes into Excel and create graphs and all sorts of mind-numbing statistics to bore the pants off your work colleagues.

Comments

• Anonymous
  October 26, 2005
  Anyway to get voting buttons in OWA?