Is there voting functionality within smartsheet?

If you are dealing with a limited number of people who you know in advance of the voting, you could assign each of them a column to vote on, and have the vote part of an approval workflow. I have done this for purchase approval processes that require the sign off of 6 department/team leaders.

If your hackathon involves many people -- especially when you don't know who will be voting in advance, you will need to look to some sort of multi-sheet system with lookups connecting the sheets, and/or adding Reports.

(Many of the brainstorming/planning meetings l have been involved in, have used the system of putting all of the "Ideas" on sheets of paper and giving the voters a limited number of sticker dots that they can stick next to the ideas they like. Spread their dots across ideas, or vote repeatedly on same idea. This would be cool to see implemented in smartsheet.)

You could also set up a form for each item with a rating or voting column whether it be 5 Stars or a dropdown of "Yes" or "No" or something to that affect. You could create a sheet that lists all of the items people can vote on along with a hyperlink that takes them directly to the form.

Each form entry will create it's own row in a Master Sheet. You can use default values to establish an identifier for each item's form submission.

Since every vote would be on one Master Sheet, you could very easily pull metrics and get your totals from votes. I have used this setup before, and it worked very well for me.

I created one form for Item A and called it "Item A Vote". It had a description of the item in the Help Text and I used a 5 start rating. I then used a hidden field with a default value of "A".

Then I simply duplicated the form, changed a little bit to reflect Item B, saved that, duplicated and adjusted for C, so on and so forth.

When I created my listing sheet, I would use a Category as a Parent row and then list all appropriate items as children. I would use the Hyperlink function and change the Display text to the item name, and have a brief description in the cell next to it.

I also set up each form to take the user to a specific URL after they submitted and used the URL for the Listing Sheet.

I hope all of my rambling makes sense. Here's some pictures... Haha