Voting Buttons in Outlook

Outlook must be used to create a message that permits voting. Additionally, a recipient must use Outlook to exercise his/her voting prerogatives. OWA cannot be use in either situation.

Creating a message that requires voting

1. Launch Outlook.
2. Create a new message.
3. Enter the list of usernames of the recipients (separated from each other by a semicolon) or use a pre-existing distribution list.
4. Enter a subject that calls the recipient's attention to the voting buttons that will be visible when the message is opened.
5. Enter the body of the message. This should again call the recipient's attention to use the voting buttons that will be visible in the toolbar area of the received message.
6. In the View menu, select Options.
7. Check the item labeled "Use voting buttons".
8. Select the desired set of possible voting options from the corresponding drop-down list or enter the desirable options in the slot, separating each option from the next with a semicolon ";". Single words or very short phrases are best.
9. Click the Close button.
10. Send the message.

Each of the recipients will receive a message that will have the set of voting buttons visible in the toolbar area, typically beneath the Reply and Reply to All buttons.
The recipient should click on the desired voting button. When a voting button is clicked, a pop-up window gives the recipient two choices: "Send the response now" or "Edit response before sending". The first choice sends the vote back to the original sender without further ado. The second choice deletes the original message and allows the recipient to enter a new message.

Responses from the voting recipients are sent to the originator of the message. The subject of each message is in the form voting-response: original-subject where "voting-response" is the name of the voting button the recipient clicked and "original-subject" is the subject line of the original message.

Returned messages that are the result of just clicking one of the voting buttons are automatically tabulated by Outlook (as described below). Returned messages that are the result of the recipient editing the received message are not automatically tabulated although the subject line of the returned message does indicate which voting button the recipient selected. The body of the returned message indicates what the recipient entered as a replacement of the original message.

Tabulating the (non-edited) voting responses

1. Launch Outlook.
2. Open the Sent Items folder.
3. Open the message that was sent with voting buttons.
4. Two additional tabs will be visible: Message and Tracking. Clicking the Message tab will display the body of the original message. Clicking the Tracking tab lists how the recipients voted.
5. Click the Tracking tab to review the voting summary as well as a list of recipients and how each voted. The tracking summary lists each of the possible responses and how many recipients just clicked a voting button—i.e., without editing the original message. If a recipient edited the message, the selected voting choice is not included in this summary. Responses involving a change in the original message must be tabulated by hand in the list of messages in the sender's Inbox.

Under the voting summary is a list of recipients and their voting responses. However, if a response is blank, then the corresponding recipient chose to edit the original message rather than just indicate a vote.

In this latter case, there are different ways of determining how these individuals voted.

Make a list of the recipients who edited the original message. Return to the Inbox. Locate each recipient and hand-tally their responses, based on the prefix in the subject line of their returned response since it indicates the voting choice.

The above process can be somewhat streamlined by performing an Advanced Find to look for messages that contain one or other of the names of the voting buttons.

• Activate the Advanced Find feature with CTRL-SHIFT-F (i.e., hold down both the CTRL key and a SHIFT key and then press the F key).
• Make sure the "Look for" item has the value "Messages".
• In the "Search for the word(s)" slot, enter one of the voting choices, immediately followed by a colon.
• Make sure the "In" slot has the value "Subject field only".
• Click the Find Now button to list the responses that selected the corresponding voting choice. This number of such responses includes the responses previously tallied as well as the responses that involved an edited message
• Repeat steps 3 through 5 with a different voting choice until all voting choices are tallied.
• Use File > Close (or click the close button at the upper right corner of the Advances Find window)