We introduced the Mac Presenter Application back in June 2011. Prior to that we had the Mac Deskbar and later, Keynote Slides, and prior to that ... well mac users didn't have any integration options (sad).

The irony is Poll Everywhere is built using Macs! We've always wanted to provide an easy-to-use and seamless solution for Apple Keynote and Mac PowerPoint users. We were close with the Mac Presenter Application, but since June, we've made some improvements. Now we're happy to introduce the latest and greatest version (1.7) of the app: Download it here. Happy holidays and enjoy!

Now:

• Hands-free! Automatic hiding and showing of polls according to slide notes.
• Simple insertion and removal of a poll in the slide notes while editing your slideshows.
• Ability to create basic, ad-hoc polls without ever leaving the Mac Presenter or visiting the Poll Everywhere website.
• Floats on top of Keynote or PowerPoint slideshows automatically.

You can get all the details and a step-by-step guide here. Download the Mac Presenter App here.

And last but not least here is a quick demo video!

"I need a report that shows me when each person arrived, collects some additional info, and shows me when they took off."

How much time have you wasted on data entry from plowing through attendance forms?

The Sign In Sheet report is a great way to track your participants’ attendance and time spent in a class or training. This is useful for tracking CPE credits, or showing attendance at a single class. Some conferences have called this "green attendance tracking" because it replaces paper-based systems for tracking sign-ins.

You can do any of the following:

• Select what you want to know about each person: Name, ID, email addresses
• Select "checkin time" and "checkout time" polls
• Add any other collected data, for example, the number of minutes missed, or session/speaker/trainer evaluation data
• Generate the report (you can also export to a spreadsheet)
• Save your fancy report format for reuse by bookmarking the page

Here a video. Go full screen to see the small type.

This is one of the most boring features we've ever made. How did you make it this far in the blog post?  Seriously, why?

Have you ever tried the Summary Table view, and thought, "Hmmm. When would I use this?"

For one, long polls can be unreadable on-screen in the graphs (without using the leaderboard view).

So the table view provides a simple linear list, in large print, that's easily viewable on any device (like tablets and phones).

As a small enhancement, you can now sort this to see precise vote counts for the most popular choices.

We observed that some people were using this as a way to give their audience a list of items to vote on. But like many of our views, you might not have realized that if you share the link to the table view with others, they will see a pretty view that leaves off your controls. We'll even take really long multiple choice polls and make several columns for you.

There's a new, easy way to preview this. Click the "expand view" button to preview what others will see.

We also noticed how sometimes you don't want to show the number of responses yet, or perhaps you have a very long list with good, self-explanatory keywords that you only want to display those alone. Click the faint Visual Settings gear, and now you can do this. 

Now you can really contribute to your audience's indecision, without pesky font sizes and legibility getting in your way. Cheers!

As background, let's quickly review how we let you register and identify respondents before today (this isn't going away).

We provide you with a link you can distribute. If they already have a Poll Everywhere login, they just confirm. Otherwise we give them a simple registration form, and they can certify their phone number.

(download)

Click here to download:

easily-import-your-participants-or-students-from-a-file-IcjzaCmdcmzfwgwCeEIb.zip (223 KB)

We found that this worked great for professors; They would simply include their registration link in an online syllabus or course web page. But many presenters and meeting planners already had a full list of who should be allowed to participate, sometimes including phone numbers.

So, now you can bulk import your pre-registered participants with a simple text file.

Why would you want to do this?

• You already know who will participate because you have their information in a spreadsheet, class roster, or event registration survey
• You wish to identify audience members without requiring them to do any work
• You wish to restrict participation or voting to a defined list of people
• You're a very large organization and wish to mass-upload all of your employees' information

How To Get Started

To get started, go to the Participants tab and click "Import Participants" from the menu on the left.

Now follow the directions on the screen.

1. Pop open your favorite spreadsheet program (e.g. Microsoft Excel or Google Spreadsheets) and create some records like this:

We show you the necessary order of these columns. Only email, first name, and last name are required. You can also include a password, a US phone number, and a "responding as" identifier for example a nickname or student id.

Because you're trusting us with their email addresses and phone numbers, it's worth reiterating our promise: We'll never sell, rent, or otherwise share emails and phone numbers entrusted to Poll Everywhere with any organization or third party.

Now export or Save-As... from your spreadsheet program as a CSV (Comma-Separated Values) file.

2. Choose the CSV file that you just created.

Remember, these people will be able login to Poll Everywhere in order to see a history of their responses or to respond using any web device like a smartphone or laptop. To login, they'll use their email and a password. Since the password field per-person is optional, you can choose to set a default password for those empty password fields.

Click "Continue" to upload the file. We'll inspect it for problems.

3. Once it's uploaded, we'll validate the people in your file.

We'll show you a progress bar indicating the percentage of participants in your file that we've validated. Depending on how many records there are, this could be a very quick process (you might not even see the progress bar) or it could take a few minutes.  

Don't feel obligated to stick around during this. You can close your browser and go watch TV, eat popcorn or make some Italian sausages. Our little mechanical friends are doing this in the background. You can keep track of the progress on the main Import Participants page.

4. Once we've validated all the people in your CSV file, we'll show you any errors we can fix, errors we can't fix without your help, and all the lines which are crystal clean.

(download)

Click here to download:

registering-lots-of-participants-got-you-down-no-more-lEhuvlxhlbxpEllunavh.zip (86 KB)

At this point you can correct any errors in your CSV file and start this process again from the beginning or click "Continue" to import them for real. 

Just like when we initially checked your file, we'll show you a progress bar as we import your list.

5. Once we're done importing we'll show you the records we imported successfully and those that we couldn't import.

You can download a list of the problems for tweaking and re-uploading later.

6. You'll see all your imports and their status on the main Import Participants page.

Viola! Now you can register lots of participants very, very fast!  

Registering participants is included on all of our paid plans, and there's no limit to the number of participants you can register.

Happy Importing! It's summer -- enjoy that Italian sausage.

We call them your "participants".

You might call them your audience, your voters, your students, or your attendees.

Whatever you call them, there's a good chance you have hundreds of them, and you want to have accurate data in Poll Everywhere. The Registered Participants feature is one of the ways you can identify who responded. It's also used for grade reports and restricting who can respond.

We found there are lots of times where the administrator just needs to help a participant get the right information into Poll Everywhere, whether it's resetting a password for someone at a live event, or double checking the phone number on file after class.

On your Participants List, just click "edit".

Here's a demo video showing both participant registration and an administrator editing that information later.

People have been using Poll Everywhere to make word clouds and tag clouds for years. Now, we've made it even easier with a simple two-step process for our favorite word cloud services: Wordle, Tagxedo, and Tagul.  You'll find a new view called "Word cloud" on your Free Text Polls.

Here's an example word cloud from a talk where Ev and Biz (the founders of Twitter) used Poll Everwhere to collect questions from the audience.

We've reinvented the poll creation process!

• Faster 'from scratch' poll creation
• Copy and paste to create multiple polls
• Quick bulk creation - Import (upload) hundreds of polls at once

Simply create a new poll and start typing your question(s) and answers. Nervous? Check out the demo.

Gadzooks!

Ever been in a venue where there's spotty or no internet, or you don't have access to a computer?

If you've registered your mobile number with us in your profile, you can just text us the word "results". We'll reply with a summary of your most recently active poll. This allows the poll creator to get their results conveniently from their mobile phone. It's not intended for your audience. You choose how and when to share the results. It's secure because results can only be sent to a phone number that you setup and certify in your profile.

If you want the summary for a different poll, just throw a keyword from that poll after the word "results". For example, when my cell phone texts in "results lion", I get this back:

To set this up, you need to do the following just once:

1. Login to Poll Everywhere.
2. Go to Settings at the top.
3. Enter your mobile number in the "Mobile phone number" field.
4. Click the "Update Profile" button.
5. After you save your profile, you'll be asked to certify your number. Follow the instructions shown in your browser.
6. After you certify the number you just entered, you're all set to go to use this helpful shortcut. You won't have to repeat these steps again.

There's a bit of a story behind this feature. A couple years ago, an imitator site popped up and this was the only feature they implemented that wasn't directly ripped from Poll Everywhere. We avoided it for a long time, even though it would only take a day to build. Nobody had ever asked for it, so why lower ourselves to that level?

We recently had a user email us that he had to go with them because he just really needed this feature. That's just silly, so we built it, and we built it better. Instead of "results <private database id>",  it's just "results", or "results" and a keyword you know. It's not really a difficut thing to offer, so instead of tiering it by plan, we're including it unlimited at every plan tier, even for free users. Enjoy. 

Whats wrong with this picture?

Poll Everywhere was built using Macs (those are our development teams' laptops), yet our Mac integration has left a lot to be desired. That is until today:

Say hello to the all-new Poll Everywhere Mac Presenter application for Mac OS X.

Now Poll Everywhere is a first class citizen on the Mac platform. Here's an example of a real-time free-text response poll right in the middle of an Apple Keynote presentation. Beautiful, isn't it? Your audience will feel like it's right inside of your presentation.

You can now do this for any poll and easily switch between other poll questions as you progress through your presentation. When you first run the application you'll see:

When you display a poll on-screen and hover your mouse over the window, you'll see the same control panel on top of the real-time poll:

Finally, when you move your mouse outside the window area, you'll see just the chart alone, making for perfect seamlessness on top of existing presentations during their slideshows, like in Apple Keynote or PowerPoint for Mac:

And that's just the start. Go ahead and download the app at http://www.polleverywhere.com/macpresenter to get polling. Be sure to check out the Help menu for things like Keyboard shortcuts and other tips and tricks you can do while using this during a presentation or in another application.

What about the old Mac stuff?

Up to now, you have had three choices for displaying real-time polls on a Mac (a few of which we'll be phasing out):

1. The Mac Deskbar will be phased out June 30, 2011 - This app has been around for awhile now and worked reasonably well but it had a number of problems and quirks for many of our users and had its share of limitations as well. It's not good enough for us if something works 90% of the time, so we'll be phasing this out.

2. Mac Slides will be phased out June 30, 2011 - Our downloadable Mac Slides approach to Mac integration was like the Ford Model T: It came in any color as long as it was black. Mac Slides also didn't support free-text polls, didn't have the same kinds of customization that you were used to with the Flash counterparts on our site, and it only worked on very specific vesions of Mac OS, Keynote, and PowerPoint. We'll be abandoning this approach and open sourcing bits and pieces of this because we think the technology could be useful for some of our customers who have more demanding visualization requirements.

3. Displaying polls full-screen from your web browser will always work - Using the Fullscreen function from a web browser has always been quick and easy to display beautiful, real-time charts in front of any audience. Doing it this way is not ideal for every situation though. For example, if you're in the middle of a PowerPoint or Keynote slideshow, this requires using ⌘-Tab to get over to your browser and then using the mouse to click a few things to get it going. This isn't the most professional-looking but it works and is simple. You can keep doing this today even with our new release for Mac users we're featuring in this update.

We think getting rid of our old Mac solutions that only worked 90% of the time is the best way for us to move forward and focus on something that works for all of our Mac users 100% of the time. What are you waiting for? Get started with the Poll Everywhere Mac Presenter.