 If you conduct online trainings using Zoom and you're always looking for ways to engage with your audience, the new update from Zoom with advanced polling should be exciting. Let's dive right into it. Zoom update number 1581 introduces advanced polling and quizzes. In this video, I will focus on the advanced polling option. As with most things in Zoom, we start by signing into a Zoom account. Next, we go to settings and scroll down till you find polls. We have a new option that says allow host to create advanced poll and quizzes. Enable it, then click save. When you create meetings with this setting enabled, you will be able to now create advanced polls. Let's start by scheduling a new meeting. Click on meetings, schedule a meeting and give the details of your meeting. Once you have set up your meeting, click on save. Once the meeting is saved, scroll down till you find polls and quizzes and click on the create button. We get two options, polls and advanced polls. Polls is what you are already used to. You can have a poll that has a single choice or multiple choice. But what we are interested in is the advanced polls. Let's click on it. If you click on the drop down, we can see we have multiple options for creating polls now. A total of eight options. Let's go through them one by one. Let's start by giving a title to a poll. Next, let's choose the first question. As a trainer, I want to know what is the favorite color of the attendees. So let me type in the question. Let's put in a few choices, red, green and let's give the audience an option to choose none of the above. We can make the question mandatory. Click on the required. Also, if we want to show the choices as a drop down rather than as a list, I can click on show as drop down. To make the question more visual, we have an option to upload an image. Click on upload image option and navigate to the folder that has the image. Click on it and click open. We now have a nice image next to our question, making it more visual. Let's try the next poll type. Click add question and this time I will choose multiple choice. Multiple choice allows the participant to choose more than one option that is provided. Let's phrase an appropriate question for this. Let's say we want to poll the audience to understand what kind of movies they enjoy. So let's give some options to them horror, comedy, romance. Since it's a multiple choice question, we cannot use the drop down. The only option available for this type of question is whether we want to make it mandatory or not. Let's make it mandatory. If you want to make the question visually appealing, upload an image. That's a multiple choice question. Let's check the third type of poll called matching. Click on add question. From the drop down, choose matching. A matching poll is suitable when you want to present the participant with a list of prompts and a list of choices to be matched against each prompt. For example, let's say we want the participants to identify the capital for each country. Let me first phrase the question. What is the capital of each country? Type in a bunch of countries. On the right hand side, enter the list of possible answers. You are allowed to enter one additional answer compared to the number of questions. In this case, I have four questions but five possible answers. One of them obviously is wrong. As usual, you have an option to make it mandatory and upload an image. Let's move on and check the fourth type of poll called rank order. Click on the arrow and choose rank order. The rank order is suitable when you want to take feedback from the participants on multiple criteria. Let's say you want to take feedback on your training. Let's phrase an appropriate question. Against the rows, you define the criteria on which you want to be ranked. Let's say quality of training, knowledge of trainer, training duration, the food that was provided during the training and so forth. Against the columns, you will create a rating scale. Let's say one represents excellent and five represents poor. So we can change the columns. So for each of these criteria, the participant will be able to rank between one to five. Once all the options are defined, decide whether you want to make it mandatory and also if you want to upload an image. And this is how it will appear to the audience when you launch the poll. Isn't that cool? Let's move on to the next type of question, which is the short answer. Click on add question. Choose from the drop down short answer. A short answer will present a text box for the participant to fill. The limit is 500 characters. If you try to put more than 500 characters, let's say 1000 characters, it will switch to 500 characters. The default is 200 characters. Let's freeze our question. Let's say I want the participant to type any text about what he learned during the training session. So that's my question. I can decide to make it required and as usual add an image. And this is how the short answer will be presented to the participant. The next poll type is the long answer. Click on add question. Choose long answer. A long answer is the same thing as a short answer. The only difference is the length. You can enter up to 2000 characters instead of 500. If you try to enter a value more than 2000, like let's say 6000, it will change to 2000. In this case, it will allow the participant to enter up to 2000 characters to provide his or her feedback. As with other question types, we can decide to make it mandatory or not and also to upload an image. And this is how a long answer will be presented to the participant. The next type of poll question is fill in the blanks. Click on add question. Choose the drop down and select fill in the blank. A fill in the blank type of poll allows the participant to type in the answer rather than choosing it from a list. Let's phrase an appropriate question. In this case, we want the participant to type in the name of the planet that is closest to earth. Decide whether you want to make this question mandatory or not and upload an image if you wish. And this is how the question will be presented to the participant. You can of course have multiple fill in the blanks where the participant has to type multiple answers to the same question. A final poll type is something called a rating scale. Click on add question, click on the drop down, scroll down and choose rating scale. Rating scales are very popular in surveys. For example, you want to understand the overall satisfaction of the participants towards your training. Phrase the appropriate question. What is the likelihood of the participant recommending this training to others? Rating scales are normally set from 0 to 10, but you could change it to be from 0 to 5 or 0 to 8. It's up to you. Let's leave it at 10. You can give a label to indicate what 0 means and what 10 means. Finally, you can choose to make it mandatory or not and upload an image. And this is how the poll will be presented to the participants. Click on save and our poll questions are ready. Let's see how these polls look in an actual meeting. Let me start this meeting. As a host, when I click on polls, I should see the poll questions. To demonstrate how the polls work, I have one more session on the screen here that I have logged in from my phone. As a host, I will launch the poll. And this is what the participants will see on their screen. Of course, the view will change based on the size of the screen on a mobile phone. This is how it will appear on the bigger screen. The layout might change slightly, but the poll remains the same. Let's say as a participant, I answer the first question. I click read for the next question. Let's say my choices are horror, romance and thriller. Scroll down to the next question. What is the capital of each country? So here I have to match the country with the capital. The next question was a rank order. So for each of the criteria, I can choose the right for the short answer. I have to type in the answer here. So let's say I learned effective time management. Next was the long answer. I can type in my feedback for this training program. The next question was fill in the blanks. So let me answer that. The planet closest to Earth is, let's say Mercury. And the final was the rating scale. And let's say I would like to score it nine out of 10. I have answered all the questions, click on the submit button, and the answers are visible to the host. Once all the answers have been received, you click on end poll. If you need more details about the results of the poll, you can always click on view details that will take you to the zoom profile where you can view all the answers in more detail. And that is advanced polls. I hope you give it a try in your next Zoom training or your next Zoom meeting to better engage with your audience.