Keep the deck's structure slides up to date

The group chart and the step plan sit in a deck that keeps changing: the board pack for Beta Holding A/S, the step paper for Project Alpha, the client's own presentation. So does the structure. Each time an entity is added or a holding moves, someone has to make the slides match again, and a pasted picture of the chart cannot be corrected in the meeting.

The Juristic add-in for PowerPoint puts the structure's slides into the deck as native PowerPoint shapes, tells you which of them are behind Juristic, updates them in place and sends edits made in PowerPoint back to the structure. Two questions decide how you use it. Where is the structure being changed: in Juristic, in the deck, or in both? And does the deck have to look like the client's or like Juristic's?

You need the add-in installed and to be signed in to it; see sign in to Juristic in Word and PowerPoint.

Insert the structure's slides

1. Open the deck in PowerPoint, go to the slide the structure should follow, and click Structures in the Juristic group on the Home tab. The Juristic pane opens beside the deck.

2. Open the Structures tab. It shows the structures you opened recently; choose All to browse every structure you have access to, or search by the structure's, matter's or group's name.

3. Click the structure. Its slides are listed with a preview of each. A slide that is already in this deck says which slide number it is.

4. Tick the slides you need, or Select all. You can insert up to 20 slides at a time.

5. Decide on Match this deck's theme. On, the slides take the presentation's fonts and colours, which is what a client's board pack or the firm's own template needs. Off, they keep Juristic's formatting, so they look as the chart does in Juristic.

6. Click Insert (the button says how many slides). The slides go in after the slide you are on, as shapes and connectors you can select and edit like any other.

If the structure's slides are a different size from the deck, the pane warns you before you insert: the content may not fit the slide. Check the slide size in Juristic or in PowerPoint first.

See which slides are behind Juristic

Once the deck has Juristic slides, a Deck button appears at the top of the pane. When slides need updating it says how many. Click it for every Juristic slide in the deck, grouped by structure, with its status:

Click a slide in the list to go to it. Its actions are then on the Slide tab, which always follows the slide you are on in PowerPoint.

Update outdated slides

1. To update every outdated slide in one go, click Deck, then Update beside "slides are behind Juristic", and confirm. To update one slide, go to it and click Update slide at the bottom of the Slide tab.

2. Read the confirmation before you confirm. Updating replaces the slide with a new one generated from Juristic: speaker notes, transitions and comments on the old slide are not carried over, and shapes you added to the slide by hand are removed. The confirmation says how many.

Speaker notes and slide comments therefore belong somewhere other than the Juristic slides, or have to be copied across after an update.

Send edits made in PowerPoint back to Juristic

When a partner moves boxes around or corrects a company name on the slide itself, the change does not need to be made twice.

1. Go to the slide. The bar at the bottom of the Slide tab says how many changes are not in Juristic, and how many were added, changed or removed.

2. Click Review and push. The preview lists what will be sent: entities moved, resized or renamed, relationship labels changed, and entities and relationships added from the structure's library.

3. If shapes were deleted on the slide, they are listed under Removed in PowerPoint, unticked. Tick only what should also be removed in Juristic; removing an entity also removes its relationships. Unticked ones stay in Juristic.

4. Click Push changes. Juristic redraws the connectors itself, so the lines follow the entities they connect. When the push adds or removes anything, the slide is then regenerated from Juristic so that it looks exactly as it does there.

Free text, sticky notes and group frames are drawn from Juristic but are not entities, so changes to them stay in PowerPoint. If you can view the structure but not edit it, the pane says so and there is nothing to push.

Resolve a conflict

A conflict means the structure was changed in Juristic while someone was also editing the slide. The pane cannot merge the two, and a slide in conflict cannot be pushed: it has to go back to Juristic's version first.

1. If the edits made in PowerPoint matter, note them before you continue.

2. Click Update on the bar at the bottom of the Slide tab and confirm with Update from Juristic. The edits made in PowerPoint on that slide are replaced by the version in Juristic.

3. Make the edits that matter again on the updated slide, and push them.

Discard PowerPoint edits in Slide actions (the menu beside the slide's title) does the same, and is also there for a slide that is only Edited here: it regenerates the slide from Juristic, and the confirmation lists the edits that will be lost.

Ask JuristIQ to do it

The JuristIQ tab can read the presentation, find Juristic structures and insert or update their slides. It asks before it changes the deck.

• "Which Juristic slides in this deck are outdated?"
• "Insert the group structure from Project Alpha after this slide."
• "Summarise the ownership on the current slide."

Select a slide or some shapes first to tell JuristIQ what you mean by "this".

Tips from practice

• Push edits back before someone changes the structure. A slide edited in PowerPoint becomes a conflict as soon as a colleague changes the structure in Juristic, and then the PowerPoint edits are the ones that are lost.
• Keep the deck's own content off the Juristic slides. Speaker notes, transitions and comments do not survive an update. Put them on a slide of their own beside the chart.
• One deck, one setting. Use Match this deck's theme for every slide in a deck, or for none. The default for new insertions and updates is in the add-in's Settings.
• Unlink a slide to freeze it. Unlink from Juristic in Slide actions keeps the slide exactly as it is, but it no longer shows a status, updates or pushes changes. Do this for a version of the structure as it stood at signing.

To send the structure on its own rather than into an existing deck, see send the structure as an editable PowerPoint. For the chart in a memo or opinion, see insert a structure chart into a Word document.