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I then want to give them a set of options to select from. While open ended questions which allow the user to enter any text they want are great for English Literature questions, they make lousy poll questions because they are very difficult to tabulate. So I came up with 5 possible options that they can select from:<\/p>\n
Yes, I’ve attended multiple times Yes, I’ve attended once No, I did not know about them No, I cannot get to the RBELC during the day No, I cannot make Mondays. Next I navigate to the page where I want the place the poll. Note that I could create a separate new page for the poll so that the poll appears in the navigation.<\/p>\n Then enter Design Mode and select the Forms<\/strong> tab in the Portlet Library<\/strong>. Next drag the Poll<\/strong> portlet into one of the content areas on the page. There is no Edit<\/strong> pencil in the portlet header. Rather you see a set of tabs. The View<\/strong> tab is selected.<\/p>\n However there is nothing beneath it. Of course, we have not yet defined anything in the poll. Click the Edit<\/strong> tab to begin defining the Poll.<\/p>\n The Poll Details<\/strong> dialog begins with the question that you want to ask in the Poll. While you have some formatting capabilities, it is not as flexible as a regular content area. However, considering that a poll is meant to just ask a question, it is probably sufficient.<\/p>\n Beneath the question area is a section which has boxes for 5 possible answers. Note that you do not need to use all five and you can have more than five by clicking the Add Answer<\/strong> button having only a single possible answer usually defeats the purpose of a poll. Anyway, type one answer in each of the answer boxes. Do not click Add Answer<\/strong> unless you need more than 5 possible answers.<\/p>\n You can actually type your answers in any order. After you have entered them, you can manually reorder their sequence by click and dragging the blue four headed arrow to the left of each entry and move it up or down. You can also delete an entry that you are not using by clicking the red ‘X’ to the right of any entry box.<\/p>\n You then have 3 check boxes at the bottom of this section. The first allows the user to select more than one answer such as would be used with a question like:<\/p>\n Select the portlet(s) that you would like to learn more about:<\/p>\n The second check box allows you to randomize the order of the answers. I don’t know why you would do something like this in anything other than a Quiz situation that only had a single question.<\/p>\n The third check box allows the user to enter their own answer in a text box. However, remember that it is very hard to tabulate manually entered text so you might just want to rethink the question and\/or the discrete answers.<\/p>\n Next, under Display Options<\/strong> you can define the text that appears on the Submit<\/strong> button. ‘Submit’<\/em> would see the logical in most cases. You can also allow the user to see the results so far. To keep from indicating how many people have or have not responded to the poll, you could display the results as percentages only. My personal choice is to hide the results. Not that I don’t want people to know the final results, but just like early election returns may not reflect the final vote, early poll returns may not predict the final result and may even influence the answers of others who may be watching over your shoulder.<\/p>\n You can also select how to display the poll results using either a bar or pie chart. Pie charts are generally not a good choice if you have more than 5 or 6 possible answers or if the distribution between the answers is fairly even.<\/p>\n Finally under Additional Options<\/strong>, you can display a CAPTCHA for guests to your page. You can even block guests or limit how often they vote by using a first party cookie. This is useful for preventing robot voting. Note that cookies are based on the machine IP address and not the user name. So if people are using a shared machine such as in the library, this could be a problem since the shortest expiration of a cookie is one day. Finally you can choose to close the poll on a specific date and time.<\/p>\n So how do you as the poll creator see results? That is what the report tab is for. Again your options are to view the results as a bar or pie chart. My comments about pie charts from above still apply. However, even the bar chart can be difficult to read as shown in the following example:<\/p>\n
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