Outlook 2007: How To Use Voting Buttons in a Message
Contributed by Rob Rogers 
Tagged: Microsoft Outlook You can use the Voting Buttons to get responses from a group of colleagues to see what the majority of them are leaning towards. This comes in handy when getting feedback for a meeting date and location or for figuring out where everyone is going to meet after work. Outlook tallies the votes for you so that they can easily be assessed.
To Insert Voting Buttons into your Message:
1. Create your New Message.
2. Select the Options tab.
3. Select Use Voting Buttons.
4. Choose the voting buttons you wish to use from the four options provided (Approve; Reject, Yes; No, Yes; No; Maybe, or Custom).
5. Make sure your message is the way you want it, including the question or statement that is to be voted on. Make sure you have included the proper recipients for the email message.
6. Click Send.
The recipients of your message will notice a highlighted line of text (vote by clicking Vote in the Respond group above) showing up above the From line in the email. By clicking Vote, they will be shown the voting options to select from. After they select the desired voting option, a confirmation prompt will appear showing their selection and giving them the choice of sending the response or editing the response before sending.
Getting a Tally of the Votes:
You will receive the replies to your message with the selected voting option in the subject line. You could tally the votes yourself, however if you sent the message out to a large number of recipients, this could be rather time consuming. A better method is to let Outlook tally the votes for you.
1. Go to your Sent Items.
2. Open the message that had the voting buttons.
3. Go to the Ribbon.
4. In the Show section, select Tracking.
You will see the reply totals followed by a list of the individual votes.
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Rajgoaj said on November 24, 2008
Useful
notesuser said on May 19, 2009
Not that useful. Can’t be used to capture sign off as it the response does not include the original email.
Nauman Ansari said on August 3, 2009
I’ve sent out an email with voting option this morning at 11:13 am and got 3 response (by outlook) at 11:38 am. When i viewed the voting response the name appeared for all users but response field display nothing.
Anonymous said on February 5, 2010
What is going on thta not all the voting is tracking? is it because I moved the orignal request email?
Oatdoy said on February 24, 2010
Same situation as mine. I move the original email to another folder, and the tracking stops functioning :(
Anonymous said on April 28, 2010
Yes, the original message should stay in the Sent Items folder for you to continue viewing the tracking list
Guest said on August 16, 2010
What is the Ribbon? I clicked on everything in the message and nothing has a “show” or “tracking” option.
nik said on August 30, 2010
When you open the mail from Sent Item, you will see a tracking option.
Pam said on November 24, 2010
I’ve found that Rules that move emails to folders also interfere with the tracking function. Make sure no rules will apply to the replies to get the best results.
Arild said on January 4, 2011
The function assumes that the recipient has not minimized the Ribbon. For those who have minimized the Ribbon (e. g. myself), the comment “Vote by clicking Vote in the Respond group above” is confusing. (No Respond group is visible.)
My suggestion (for the next version) is that the voting alternatives are automatically shown somewhere.
Timpark62 said on March 10, 2011
If you move it back to sent will it start tracking again?
Mark Dupuy said on March 14, 2011
I ran into this same problem and moved the message back to the SENT ITEMS folder. It appears to be tracking messages again. However, I do have some names showing in the tracking list that have NOT responded and they show a blank in the Response column. What is up with that?
annoyed said on April 7, 2011
The voting buttons should appear in the body of the text. So the receipent can view the buttons easily and vote.
Rgonzalez8691 said on April 14, 2011
Is there a way of having the email track again once it stopped due to moving it out of the sent folder?
James said on July 1, 2011
Can only one statement (question) be voted on per e-mail? I would have think that one should be able to include the voting buttons in an e-mail message for multiple questions to be voted on, eg. which of the following three options do you agree with?
Guest said on July 1, 2011
Message Options window opens only when I select Custom; Message Options window does not open when I select Yes;No, Approve; Reject, etc.
Lady-r7 said on July 5, 2011
So you can only ask one question at a time? What if you have multiple questions and want users to select yes or no for each question?
Dorlondon said on July 19, 2011
Can you reply to those respondants that answered yes and not those that answered no?
J Hillier said on August 11, 2011
You can list multiple options. When you select the “Use Voting Buttons” form teh ribbon, click on “Custom”. This will open a window allowing you to customize the options. In the Voting Options bar, type your list of selectable items to vote on, seperated by a semi-colon. This will provide a list for the recipients to choose from.
Capt. Fairweather said on September 26, 2011
One thing not mentioned anywhere that I found is that you have to open the message replys before the votes will show up in the tracking list. So for any missing votes check to make sure you opened their message
Shenderson said on October 27, 2011
Is there a way in insert multiple questions and have voting buttons for each one>
Jane said on November 3, 2011
There’s always someone who doesn’t use the voting button or communicates verbally so his/her reply doesn’t appear in the tracking. Can sender enter it somehow?
Suzy said on December 8, 2011
Voting buttons don’t seem to work if the recipient does not use Outlook 2007. All the recipients I sent to said that they could not see any voting buttons. If this is the case, then Outlook should tell you this when you are setting up the voting buttons. Please let me know if I am wrong!
Nimesh said on December 18, 2011
is ti required trust relation if i want to setup for between two forest
QAPaul said on December 27, 2011
Does anyone know of a way to make the voting anonymous, ie. responses are received but the name of the responder is not shown?