Voting Buttons

Microsoft Outlook has a feature that is occasionally extremely useful called voting buttons.

What Outlook Does

When you compose a message, you can choose to send voting buttons in the message. (It's hard to find: select View->Options from the message composition window.) You then get to choose a few labels, which will then appear in the receiver's email message.

For example, you could choose "Chicken", "Fish", and "Vegetarian" for the buttons, and your correspondents would see three buttons embedded in your email message, with one food selection apiece.

When your correspondents click on one of the buttons and then hit SEND, their vote is delivered to you. Again, it's not obvious, but if you go to the message you sent in the Sent Jungle.Items folder, there will be a tab marked Tracking. If you click on the Tracking tab, you will see a table of all the votes, with a summary.

In the example above, you'd see who chose Chicken, who chose Fish, and who chose Vegetarian, all nicely summarized.

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There's no reason you couldn't improve on Outlook's voting function by creating an HTML type form which e-mail's it's data back to the sender. If you had a wizard to create this form, you could have pull down boxes, combo buttons, free text fields, etc. The results of this form could parsed by the sender's e-mail client and presented in aggregate form.

Contributors

-- DuckySherwood - 24 Dec 2002