How to customize voting buttons in Outlook?

Author Kelly Last modified 2025-04-10

Normally there are only three kinds of voting buttons in emails: Approve; Reject, Yes; No, and Yes; No; Maybe. Most of the time, more flexible voting buttons are required to apply in our email messages. Here I will introduce the way to customize voting buttons in emails in Microsoft Outlook easily.

Customize voting buttons in Outlook
Customize multiple-choice voting buttons with checkboxes in Outlook

Customize voting buttons in Outlook

To add custom voting buttons in your email messages in Microsoft Outlook, please do as follows:

1. Create a new email message by clicking "Home" > "New Email".

2. In the new Message window, go to the "Options" tab, and click "Use Voting Buttons" > "Custom".

the screenshot of step about customizing voting buttons in outlook 1

3. In the popping-up Properties dialog box (or "Message Options" dialog box in Outlook 2007), remove the original voting options from the "Use voting buttons" box, and then enter your custom voting options. See screenshot below:
Notes:
(1) You can add as many voting options as needed, and remember to separate each voting option with a semicolon.
(2) Keep the checkbox before the "Use Voting buttons" checked all the time.

the screenshot of step about customizing voting buttons in outlook 2

4. Click the "Close" button to exit the Properties dialog box.

5. Compose your email message, and then click the "Send" button.

When recipients receive your email message with the custom voting buttons, they can click the text of "Click here to vote." in the message header and then specify a voting option from the dropdown list. See screenshot below:

the screenshot of step about customizing voting buttons in outlook 3

If you receive recipients' voting responses, you can view the voting responses at the message headers at a glance.

the screenshot of step about customizing voting buttons in outlook 4

Note: The customized voting button is only applied to the current message. When you create a new message, the voting button you customized will disappear, so you need to customize a new voting button for each new message if needed.

Customize multiple-choice voting buttons with checkboxes in Outlook

As you know, the voting buttons are single-choice and shown in the message header with the above method. However, sometimes you may want to add voting buttons in the message body. Here, this method will introduce Kutools for Outlook's "AutoText" feature to insert checkboxes in the message body as voting buttons.

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1. In the Mail view, click "Home" > "New Email" to create a new email.

2. In the opening Message window, click "Kutools" > "Pane" to activate the "AutoText" pane, open the "CheckBox" category, and then double-click "Checkbox 1" to insert it into the message body. See screenshot:

the screenshot of step about customizing multiple-choice voting buttons with checkboxes in Outlook 1

3. Repeat Step 2 above to add more checkboxes, and then rename the checkboxes to your voting options as shown in the screenshot below.

the screenshot of step about customizing multiple-choice voting buttons with checkboxes in Outlook 2

4. Compose your email message, and then click the "Send" button.

Note: When recipients receive this email with multiple-choice voting buttons in Outlook, they need to (1) click "Home" > "Reply", (2) check multiple voting buttons as needed, and then (3) send the reply email.