Make Excel exports look like the firm's

A CP checklist, a contract review grid, a chronology in a table, a cap table: all of them leave the firm as Excel workbooks, often straight to the client. Without a template they leave in Juristic's standard styling. As an organisation admin, or in practice support, you set one Excel export template for the firm, and the Excel exports from boards, Insights, timelines and cap tables are styled from it.

You set it up once, in two passes: style a starter workbook in Excel, then fine-tune the values in Juristic.

Style the starter workbook

1. Open Admin panel from your user menu, and under Templates choose Excel export. Only organisation admins have the Admin panel.

2. Click Download starter template. You get a workbook called juristic-excel-template.xlsx.

   

3. Open it in Excel and style it the way the firm's own spreadsheets look: the font, size and colour of the header row and of the body, the fill colour of the header row, and the borders. Save it as .xlsx; the file can be up to 10 MB.

4. Back in Juristic, click Upload styled .xlsx and choose the file. If the page already shows Template configured, the button is Replace template instead. Juristic reads the styling out of the workbook, and Template configured shows the date it was last updated.

   

Fine-tune the details

5. Check the values read from the workbook under Typography, Palette and Layout, and change any of them here rather than in Excel. A typed value is saved when you leave the field or press Enter; a colour or border style as soon as you choose it.

   

   Setting	What it changes in the exported workbook
   Header font family, Header font size, Header font colour	The heading row. Leave the colour empty and the export picks one that reads against the header fill.
   Body font family, Body font size, Body font colour	Every row below the headings.
   Primary colour	The fill of the heading row.
   Secondary colour, Accents	The rest of the firm's palette. Click + Add for another accent colour.
   Border style	The cell borders: thin, medium, thick, double or none. Borders are drawn in black.
   Zoom scale	The zoom, in per cent, the sheet opens at.
   Frozen columns (xSplit)	How many columns on the left stay in view while the reader scrolls sideways.
   Logo rows, Logo height (px)	The band of rows at the top of the sheet that holds the logo, and how tall the logo is.

   Zoom scale and Logo rows apply to a board's All columns (classic) Excel export and to Insights tables, and Frozen columns (xSplit) to the board export only. A timeline export and a board's Custom Excel export keep their own sheet layout.

6. To put the firm's logo on the exports, click the picture button (Upload logo) on the template and choose a PNG, JPEG or GIF image of up to 5 MB. Remove logo takes it off again.

Go back to the standard look

7. To stop using the template, click Delete template (the red bin) and confirm with Delete. Exports go back to the standard styling until a new template is uploaded. To change the template instead, style the workbook again and click Replace template. Replacing reads every value from the new workbook, so changes made under Typography, Palette and Layout and a logo uploaded separately are lost: do them again afterwards.

Tips from practice

• Export before you announce it. Once the template is up, export a real board to Excel and open it, so you see the result the client will see. A colour that looks right on screen can be too dark for a heading row that is printed.
• Freeze what identifies the row. In a checklist's All columns (classic) Excel export, two frozen columns keep the number and the task title in view while the reader scrolls across to the status and the deadline.
• Use fonts everyone has. Excel replaces a font the reader does not have installed, so choose the firm's standard Office font rather than a design font from the brand guide.
• One look for the whole firm. The template applies across the organisation, not per team or per board. Which columns a board export contains is set separately, below it on the same page.

To give board exports the same columns as well as the same look, see give every board the same Excel columns. The exports themselves are covered in hand the checklist over in Excel, hand the review over in Excel and hand over the chronology as a table.