Voting is important. When you cast your votes, you let the other person (and everyone else who can see the votes) know where you stand. In Outlook, there’s a simple but very handy feature where you can add votes to your email and cast your own vote when you receive an email with a voting request. Whether you want to know which option your team thinks is the best or just simply which venue would be best for your next meeting, adding an option to vote for the recipients is a way to do that. It’s also an excellent feature for when you want only a one-word answer from limited set of choices.
Votes in Outlook Mail
So, let’s see how you can do this in Outlook. We will look at how you can add votes to your email, how you can send your vote, and where to see the tally of all the votes for a specific email.
To add a vote in your email:
When you go to New > Email to compose a new email message,
- Go to the ‘Options’ tab at the top ribbon
- Open “Use Voting Buttons” dropdown menu
- Select from preset votes that simply as “Approve/Reject,” Yes/No, Yes/No/Maybe
- Or you can use your own custom votes by clicking on “Custom”
When you click “Custom,” you will be greeted with the properties dialog box with many other settings. Check the box that says “Use Voting Buttons.” Then, to add your own custom, just type the vote you want; separate the different votes by a semi colon (;).
How to cast a vote for an email that requests for votes?
When you will receive an email with voting buttons, you see the option to vote inside the “respond” group in the ‘Message’ tab at the top ribbon.
Clicking on ‘Vote’ will open the list of all the voting buttons that the sender has added to the email. After selecting the preferred vote, Outlook asks if you want to send the response now or edit the response before sending. Editing the response will cast your vote but also give you a reply window where you can also add whatever message you want to send. The subject for the reply message will automatically be the vote button that you chose.
How to see all the votes for an email?
If you are an owner/sender of the email with votes, you can see the votes by clicking ‘Tracking.’ It’s inside the ‘Message’ tab > ‘Show’ group. You can also see the votes of each recipient and the total number of votes as well.
Cannot See the Voting Option?
If you cannot see the voting option, its likely that you have set the message formatting to be HTML. For vote buttons to work, you need to create a rich-text formatted email (rtf).
Open Outlook, go to File > Options > Mail. Scroll below to the “Message Format” section and switch the format to Outlook Rich Text format.
There are some third-party software and services to add voting in your mail, but those often require subscription if not paid licenses, but they also offer a lot more features. But the built-in feature we just discussed above is a simplest way to get a quick vote from the recipients without too much of a fuss.
Note that it will only work with Outlook. An email with votes if viewed through other clients like a web-based Gmail, it won’t show up.