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Reader to Reader - 11 Jan 2001

Voting Button Quirks

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In her July 2000 Outlook Tips and Techniques column, Sue Mosher described a situation in which a user never saw a Tracking tab for a message she had marked for a return receipt because she had moved her copy of the message from the Sent Items container before the receipt was returned. A similar problem can occur when you're using voting buttons. If the message originator places her copy of a message that uses voting buttons somewhere other than in her mailbox (e.g, in Personal Folders*.pst file*or in another mailbox), a Tracking tab won't be created when the responses are returned and opened. In a situation where this problem occurs, any responses that have been opened are voided. The solution is to have the message originator move her copy of the voting button message into her Sent Items container, then notify users whose vote was voided to resend their responses.

Another quirk of voting buttons occurs when you have Macintosh users in your environment. Users viewing voting buttons on a message through the Outlook for Macintosh client see only the first word of each button, minus the last character, as Figure 1 shows.

To counteract this problem, I instruct users who originate a message containing voting buttons to offer only one-word options (or use underscores to connect multiple words) and to add a period to the end of each choice. Figure 2 shows the result of this action for PC and Mac users.

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