FAQ’s About Polling Apps

CloudVOTE is a cloud-based, training and education content storage management system that lets you upload your content made in PowerPoint (PPTX) to a central location where you can reach it at any time and never have to carry those files with you.

The basics of the system are explained in this video.

It will also let you invite anyone with a smartphone, tablet or a computer to participate in the session and you can ask them to answer questions that you prepared for them.

CloudVOTE is free to try for up to 500 participants. The only limitation is that you cannot come back to your uploaded templates and reports from polls cannot be saved for future use.  You’ll need a paid subscription to receive a username and password and your own, private and secure account.

Yes.

All price tiers of CloudVOTE support pushing content to other devices (participants). You can push the same content to the projected screen in front of the audience, or push a supplemental slide deck just to the mobile devices in your audience’s hands.

The paid version is more even generous and allows you to save your templates and polls securely and privately within CloudVOTE.

When you use the free version of CloudVOTE, you can invite up to 500 attendees and push your content to each audience device, but you will not be able to keep your templates or polls with us, and you will be limited to automatically generated Join Code (Access Key). For just $75/month, you can customize your Access Key to say, for example: “bestmeeting” (subject to availability) and you can store your presentation content to be reused from any device and any location, at any time.

Short answer: ULTRA FAST

Longer answer: It depends. We have tested presentations with 200 slides importing in under 2 minutes, but the speed will vary with the actual size (size in MB) of the presentation file.

Typical presentation (cca 50 slides & approximately 10MB in size) should upload in under 1 minute.

Your audience can bring any one of their web-enabled devices. iPads, iPhones, Android and Windows smartphones and tablets and even the good ol’ (or is it just old?) Blackberry. They can also vote comfortably from their laptops or desktops, if they’d like.

Yes, but…

…you better have a phablet (iPhone 6+, Galaxy Note or similar) to view and operate the session from your phone.

We recommend something larger, like a 10″ tablet, or larger laptop.

As a presenter, you will use the Access Key (or Join Code) and Password we sent you in a Welcome Email to log into your CloudVOTE account and start a presentation from one of your templates.

Your audience needs to have the Access Key as a login to join your session once you’ve started it.

We use a format “adjective+noun” randomizer to generate your Access Key, e.g. “spottedcast”.

Alternatively, we can create an Access Key that you will provide. Try to make it short, sweet, and unique to you. You will be using it every time you want to start a new session and your audience will use it to join the session in progress.

Since CloudVOTE runs entirely in a browser, ANY platform is supported. That means, in our world, for the first time ever, Macs, Windows PCs, Chromebooks, iOS and Android devices are all equal. Crazy, right?

You will always need a PPTX file to be uploaded to your CloudVOTE account, but we do not care whether you created it on a Mac, PC or Chromebook. Even Google Slides presentations or Keynote files, as long as they are converted to (saved as) PPTX files, can be uploaded to CloudVOTE without an issue. We are planning a native Google Slides support in the future, so stay tuned.

Since iOS is a very ‘closed-down’ platform (bad Apple!) you will not be able to browse for and select the PPTX from the iPad or iPhone, but you will be able to do that from an Android device.

However, everyone can run a poll from an existing template presentation already stored in their CloudVOTE account.

No.

At this time, we strip away some of the slide functionality like animated bullet point builds, so that we can focus on the interactive polling part of the experience.

With future iterations, we plan on adding more features that will enhance your experience with the product.

We will ignore media content attached to the PowerPoint at this time.

CloudVOTE will allow you to store video and audio in the cloud with us in the future, but this feature is currently unavailable.

If you see an image like this after the upload of your template is complete, something went wrong.

Please re-upload your template and make sure that:

• no other application is using the same file (e.g. PowerPoint)
• your PPTX file has been saved in its latest format and version
• your internet connection didn’t get interrupted during the upload

If you’re missing some of the images from your presentation after the import, don’t despair. This only affects a small number of image formats. The parsing/import process we use is incompatible with the old (like 1990s) EMF/WMF image formats.

Before you re-upload your template, just make sure that you take either one of these steps:

• use a different image altogether (PNG, GIF, TIFF, JPEG, BMP & PSD)
• save your existing (WMF) image and convert it before pasting back into the presentation
• save the entire slide as an image (File –> Save As –> Just this slide) and then paste the image on top of your original slide content.

After your presentation has been uploaded, you will find it in the Templates section of your CloudVOTE account.

Click the Start Poll button next to the template you want to present:

Wait until you see the screen below and then click the Projector View button to open a new window for your audience:

You can move the window to your Extended Desktop to project to the audience on the3 biggest screen in the house.

It helps if you make the new (Projector View) window run in fullscreen mode. In Windows, use the F11 key and on a Mac, use the Control + Command + F combination.

You can very easily maximize the real estate of your Projector View by running it in full screen mode. Just press F11 or find the Full Screen option in your browser’s Options menu.

Yes.

It’s simple – just go to the Polls section of your CloudVOTE account and click on Responses and then on Print to view the print-optimized layout.

Finally, click the Print button in your browser, or press CTRL + P to invoke the print dialog. From here, you can print to a printer, or to PDF file if you are using Chrome or have a PDF printer installed on your computer.

No, you can only upload the questions/polls.

Say you already have a way to share your learning/presentation content with the audience, but you just want to ask questions during the meeting and have people answer using their mobile devices.

No problem. Create a PowerPoint slideshow with JUST the questions you want to ask and upload that to CloudVOTE. You can then only show these questions through the CloudVOTE browser window, while another window will be showing the content.

Sometimes, depending on the browser used on the mobile device and on general internet functionality, the session screen on the mobile device can time out.

This will manifest itself when the poll is open or when you are showing content to the audience on their own devices and they are not seeing what you have on your Projector View screen.

To resolve this, all the audience needs to do is refresh their browser window. On some devices, it’s a quick pull down gesture, and on some the user goes to the Options menu or Address Bar where the refresh button appears.

After a refresh, the user will be exactly on the slide and in the step that your Projector View indicates.

Yes, but…

…make sure you really mean to do that. When you click Poll on a slide/question that has been polled before, only your LAST poll will be recorded and it will overwrite previously collected data on that slide.

Once you have your session started, click on the Show Join Code button and show them the instructions:

They can also just go to www.cloudvote.com and click on the Join button there and enter your Access Key:

Finally, you can include a link in your invitation email, or directly on the screen with this URL: www.cloudvote.com/join or use this QR code that points to the same location:

(Right-click on the image to save it)

Yes.

The longer answer is that you can write a text message and push it out to the Projector View for the audience to see (or if you have a paid plan, the message will be pushed to their devices).

This is done by entering your text at the top of the Texting Section and clicking the Show button:

Your audience can also send texts to you and they will appear on the right side of the Operator View. You can click on each message and click the Show button to project it to the audience.

Yes.

As soon as you realize that you need to repoll, just go back to the slide you need to take another vote on and click the Poll button.

Only the last poll will be recorded.

We currently support PPTX (PowerPoint 2007 and up) format of the presentations.

As long as you format your question slides using the “Title and Content” layout, we will be able to detect the text on the slide and count the number of answers, so that only the correct number of voting buttons appear on people’s screens when the polling is open.

Our servers don’t like PPT (old PowerPoint), POTX (PowerPoint Template) or PPSX (PowerPoint Show) files…they’re picky eaters like that. You can only feed them PPTX files created in Office 2007, 2010, 2013 and soon 2016. Now that’s tasty…

Not that you did anything wrong…but try to download our template below and copy and paste your content into it. Then try to re-upload again.

Alternatively, download our template to a known location, open your presentation and go to Design tab. In the Themes section, click on the ‘double-arrow’ button to expand the Theme selection and click on “Browse for Themes” option. Point to our template file you just downloaded and apply it to your slideshow.

CloudVOTE Template

We don’t support uploading files that are larger than 50MB or presentations longer than 200 slides. Who wants to sit through that kind of presentation anyway?

Often, all you have to do is reduce the size of the PowerPoint file instead of cutting out slides with valuable content. The internet is overflowing with good advice on how to do this. Ellen Finkelstein knows a thing or two about it.

You can also try a simple trick of compressing the pictures in your presentation. Just go to the Format tab when you have a (any) picture highlighted and click on Compress Pictures:

We’d like to to compress ALL pictures, so DEselect the “Apply only to this picture” option and select the “Email (96dpi)” target output and click OK:

Finally, save your file (perhaps under a new name, so that you know THIS one has compressed pictures and is meant for CloudVOTE) and try to upload it again.

We found that smart quotes (not traditional quotes) get converted during our import process to special characters (e.g.”â”).

While we work on a fix, use double/single quotes instead of smart quotes inside the PPTX, which will make everything look great.

To prevent this from happening in the first place, turn off smart quotes in PowerPoint.

In order for CloudVOTE to detect the question text and answer text properly, count the number of answer choices and properly lay things out for you after the upload is completed, we need the presentation to be in a correct format.

It’s simple. As long as you have your question slides set to “Title and Content” layout option in PowerPoint.

First highlight the slide you want to format and then click the Layout icon on the Home tab:

Then select the “Title and Content” layout from the menu:

Just like in the previous FAQ, in order to see the correct number of voting buttons on the participants’ screens, we need the question slide to be formatted with the right layout in place.

Your slides simply need to be set to “Title and Content” layout option in PowerPoint. First highlight the slide you want to format and then click the Layout icon on the Home tab:

Then select the “Title and Content” layout from the menu:

We’d love to analyze your presentation and figure out why it doesn’t work with CloudVOTE.

Send it to us using the widget below, or if it is too large (>15MB), use a file sharing service like dropbox.com or wetransfer.com and send the link to [email protected].

Once you signed up and paid for your CloudVOTE subscription, you will receive a confirmation email that the payment has been processed. We will contact you within 24 hours to inquire about the custom “Access Key” that we will create for your paid account.

If you don’t wish to use a custom Access Key, simply contact us at [email protected] and let us know. We will then generate a random phrase for you that you will use to log in and invite your attendees with. Don’t worry, it will still memorable and easy to use.

To change your password, simply go to your account (www.cloudvote.com/account) and click the “Forgot login information?” link.

On the next page, enter the email address associated with your subscription and follow the instructions in the email we will send you.

If you want to cancel your subscription immediately, you are free to do so at any time.

Once the subscription is cancelled, you will not be charged at the next renewal. Your subscription is, however, considered paid for the remaining days in your current month and you will not receive a refund for any portion of the current period.

Yes…technically, you can use CloudVOTE only for a single event, since you can cancel your subscription at any time.

Once the subscription is cancelled, you will not be charged at the next renewal. Your subscription is, however, considered paid for the remaining days in your current month and you will not receive a refund for any portion of the current period.

Most of us are so busy and distracted that remembering what happened a couple of weeks ago is hard…let alone last year.

To check on your current subscription, just log in to your billing account and click on the Subscription tab on the left.

Here, you will find all the information you need.

You can upgrade or downgrade your subscription at any point by logging into your Billing Account.

Click on the Subscription tab on the left and then on View button on the right. On the Subscription page, you will see a “Switch Subscription” button. Make you selection and check out. It’s that easy.

We hope you liked CloudVOTE, but still need to cancel.

That’s easy. Log into your Billing Account and click on the Subscription link tab on the left. Then click on the View button corresponding to your subscription and cancel from there.

Done.

So you’ve tried to log into your billing account once, twice or three times and now you’re in the FAQ section, trying to figure out why. We can help.

Sometimes, your browser keeps a cached (saved) version of the page that you’ve visited before. This is often useful in loading the page quicker, but sometimes, it causes problems in remembering who you are when you’re logging in.

If you’re sure you entered the correct login name and password, but you’re still starting at the same place – the login screen, try pressing F5, which refreshes the page you’re on.

Often, this will cause the page to reload with your login information correctly entered and you will be able to access your Membership page.