If you are an instructor who has used polling slides in your presentations with any frequency, you will notice that you have a LOT of polls in your Library. When the embedded polling feature was released, all the existing polling slides in your presentation slide decks was turned into a poll, so that you could use them to embed polls into videos or audio media. Going forward, every time you create a new polling slide for a presentation, a new poll is created.

NOTE that if you are in the habit of re-using polling slides from one slide deck to another, re-use going forward does NOT create a new poll. In addition, you can now select polls from your library to add to a presentation slide deck, making reuse easier.

What you might notice now, however, is that you have a lot of duplicated polls in your library. And you may decide that you want to remove them.

This article is designed to help you filter and search and sort your library in a way to make it easier to find and delete the duplicate, extraneous polls. You don't HAVE to remove them. This information is simply for those who might want to.

It is IMPORTANT to know that you can remove ANY of the Polls from your Library and this will have NO AFFECT on the polling slides in your presentations or on any embedded polling questions inside of a video. Deleting from your library only removes the reusable item - the Poll. You do not need to keep duplicates.

Use the List View for your Library

If you do not already use the List View, you should become familiar with it. It will make deletion of duplicates or any unneeded media (of any media type, not just polls) easier. The "tile view" is the default view because it provides a thumbnail preview of the media, making it easier to identify on first glance.

To switch to the list view, click the View icon on the top right side of your Library, just below the Search/Filters bar.

From here, if you need to view the item, click ON the row. The media opens to the media details page. However for Polls, just seeing the Question Text shown as the Name in the list may be sufficient.

library with media shown in list view and list view button identified as described

The List View allows for easy sorting and for easy access to the commands available for the media. Sort the list by owner, name, type of media, Echo360 course name where it might be published, and date.

The last column on the right provides the media menu button, which contains all the commands available for each item, including Delete.

media menu button identified in list view with menu open containing options as described

These commands are also available in the media details page. If you need to SEE the item before deleting it, click on the row to open the details page, then select Delete from the commands available there.

Filter Your Library

You will want to remove all the items from your library that you don't want to work with right now to lessen the clutter, and lessen the chance that you will select to remove something you didn't mean to.

In your library, on the right side of the Search bar, click Filters. In the Filter box that appears, start by filtering by media Type. Select Poll as shown in the below figure. You can further filter by other criteria such as Owner. If you happen to have a lot of polls in your library because other people have shared presentations with you, this is one good way to find and remove them if you want to.

You don't HAVE to remove shared polls. You can use them to create embedded polling questions in your video/audio media. Once they are embedded, they belong to the interactive media and will stay there, whether or not the polls and presentation are ever "un-shared" by their owner.

library filter box open with Poll selected as type for filtering media as described

BE ADVISED: Polls are a totally separate type and piece of media from the activities or the polling questions they may be related to. FOR THIS REASON, the Term and Course filters, if used, will not return ANY Polls. Polls themselves are not published to courses.

Use the Owner filter to find just the polls that YOU created or own. Or you can use the Owner filter and select a particular user whose polls you want to find and remove. Those are there because that user had shared a presentation with you that contained polling slides.

Use the Status filter to find ALL polls in your library that were shared TO you by someone else, without specifying a specific user. This would be the same as using the Owner filter and selecting "Anyone but me".

Sort the List

Once you have the list of polls filtered, it may be time to sort the list.

Click on any of the headers available to sort the list by that column.

First click on a header sorts in ascending (alphabetical) order
Second click on the same header sorts in descending (alphabetical) order
Sorting by DATE sorts newest to oldest first (and is the initial view/default) then oldest to newest.
Column sorts are exclusive - you cannot sort by multiple columns (name and date for example).

For example then, you can sort the list by date, oldest to newest (click twice). Then look to the Name column to see the Question Text for the poll. This should help you find the oldest items and remove them if necessary.

Or you can sort by name, which will VERY Easily find the polls with the same question text, allowing you to remove the duplicates that you no longer need.

Search the List

Use the Search box at the top of your Library to enter search terms that you know reside in the QUESTION TEXT of the poll. Searching for a response option will not produce any results.

After the list is reduced to those matching the search, use the Sort to group the polls together and find the ones you do not need to keep.

For example, if you know you have asked a question about a very specific thing like Sir Francis Drake or Poliomyelitis, you can search for the term "Poliomyelitis" or "Drake" and very easily find polls with those terms in the question. It is likely some of those are duplicates and can be removed.

REMEMBER: Removing polls has no affect other than to remove the reusable poll from your library. Any embedded polling questions created from them, or polling slides in presentations that created the poll are NOT AFFECTED in ANY way. You are simply removing the re-usable item from your library (and from any other user's library if it was shared).