Poll Your Friends with Photo Vote

In this post, we'll introduce you to Photo Vote, a new app created by the Office Business Intelligence team in partnership with the Microsoft Office Labs team. With Photo Vote, you can create quick polls in Facebook, gather input from your friends, and then geek out on your results in Excel.

Having trouble deciding which movie to see, which outfit to buy, or which celebrity hairstyle to copy? You're in luck, because we just released Photo Vote, a free Facebook app that lets you poll your friends on, well, anything you want! (Fair warning: people may decide you need a Bieber.)

In Facebook, create a poll with up to three photos and captions, and then post it on your wall. As your friends vote on the options, Photo Vote collects their votes, so you can see which choice is most popular. When the votes are in, you can interact with the results in an embedded spreadsheet, or take it a step further and geek out on the data in Excel.

From start to finish, creating a poll should take about 5 minutes, tops. You can create polls in Facebook or on the go, from your Windows Phone.

First things first, you need the Photo Vote app.

But, because this was built by the Office BI team, you know we couldn’t resist an opportunity for data analysis in Excel! To slice-and-dice poll results, click the Experience the Data link underneath your photos:

 

The results of your poll now appear in an embedded spreadsheet:

You can play around with the data by clicking the gender, relationship status, and age range filters (slicers) that appear to the left of the poll results.

Here are a couple of other things you might try:

  • To embed the results on your own web page or blog, click the Information about this workbook button on the right side of the black bar ( ), copy the embed code, and then paste it into the HTML of your own blog or wiki page.
  • To open the poll results in Excel, click the View full-size workbook button ( ). This opens the workbook in Excel Web App on SkyDrive. Now, click the Download button, and then click Open to view the workbook in the Excel desktop app.

To close the embedded spreadsheet and return to the poll view, click the Return to Poll View link underneath the black bar.

Got feedback?
Photo Vote is brought to you by two teams here at Microsoft—our Office Business Intelligence team, and our Office Labs team, which is a group that test drives new concepts and ideas. Photo Vote is available through the end of the year, and we want to know what you think about it. If you're so inclined, please leave a comment on this post or in the Photo Vote forum.

Scott Heimendinger
Program Manager, Office BI