Poll your friends with Photo Vote

Having trouble deciding which movie to see, which outfit to buy, or which celebrity hairstyle to copy? You're in luck, because our very own Office Labs team 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.

Step 1: Get the app

First things first, you need the Photo Vote app.

• Get Photo Vote on Facebook
• Get Photo Vote on your Windows Phone

 For this post, I'll walk you through the process of creating a poll in Facebook.

Step 2: Create the poll

In Facebook, click Create a Poll, and then add a title, along with photos and captions. 

Step 3: Publish the poll

To post your poll on your Facebook wall, click Publish.

Step 4: Review the results

Photo Vote collects the votes for you and voila! The people have spoken:

Now, this is the Excel blog, and we're all data-heads here, so you know what's coming next... 

Step 5: Play with poll data 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.

Have fun!

-- Anneliese Wirth