Using Outlook Voting Buttons To Rate Content

One of the great new models of content evaluation is to allow the consumers of the content to tell others what they think. You’ve see this on Amazon, VirtualTourist, and ePinions. But I often hear that doing something like this on your internal content requires lots of programming or special software.

Pish-tosh. Outlook has a neat little feature called “voting buttons” where you can send out a simple email and ask people to reply with their answer. It can be as simple as “yes-no” or you can get very fancy with multiple choices. (Sorry — if you use Novell’s Groupwise there isn’t a feature like this. But you could try a free online service like SurveyMonkey and that would work just fine.)

Here, thanks to my wonderful network tech wife Diane, is exactly how to do it:

USING VOTING BUTTONS TO RATE CONTENT IN OUTLOOK 2003

Insert Voting Buttons

1. With the message open, click on Options
2. Select Use voting buttons
3. Click the voting button names you want to us

To create your own voting button names, delete the default button names, and then type any text you want. Separate the button names with semicolons.

4. Under Delivery options, select check box for Save sent message to
5. By default, it’s saved to the Sent Items folder
6. To choose a different folder, use Browse
7. Click Close and then Send

Voting buttons are only visible when you open the e-mail. They are not visible in the Preview pane.

View Voting Responses

1. Open the original message you are tracking.

This message is the one you sent, so is either in the Sent Items folder or whichever one you designated.

2. Click the Tracking tab.

Note: By default, responses that do not contain comments are recorded in the original message, and responses that contain comments are kept in the Inbox. You can choose for Outlook to automatically delete blank responses.

Copy Voting Results to Excel

1. Select the responses you want to copy.
2. Use one of the following methods:

• To select ALL rows: Click the first row, hold down SHIFT, and then click the last row.
• To select non-adjacent rows: Click the first row, hold down CTRL, and then click additional rows.

3. Once the desired responses are selected, do Edit, Copy
4. Switch to Microsoft Excel and do Edit, Paste.