Written by Steve Mahy

Important Upgrade to JCS

Over the past few months, our Development team have been working on a major upgrade to JCS, which is now available for download.

If you have already installed the March 2019 release of JCS (version 28.101.08), you will immediately notice it has an updated look and feel, with a new colour scheme and high-definition font, suitable for 4K monitors.

A new modern ribbon interface has replaced the drop down toolbars at the top of the main window. You can now easily access all the various JCS features with a couple of clicks of the ribbon. 

Initial feedback from early adopters has been very positive and are confident that it will soon become second nature to all our users.  As always, we welcome feedback and of course, we will consider any suggestions you might have to further improve navigating around the software.


Part of the “Home” tab of the JCS ribbon, with easy access to the most commonly used pages

As well as these more obvious changes, a lot of work has been going on behind the scenes to keep JCS up to date with the latest Microsoft Office features and security updates.

The last few months have also been particularly busy for our Tech Support, who on top of their usual work, have had to assist several clients with a number of issues related to recent Microsoft Office and Windows updates:

Unrecognised Database Format

This issue affected some users of JCS who had not updated the software for a couple of years. After installing a particular Windows update, they were unable to start JCS, which would report an “Unrecognised database format” error. This particular problem has been resolved for all users of JCS.

Disk I/O Errors

This error, which can occur at random times whilst using JCS, is also caused by recent Windows updates. We are hopeful Microsoft will soon provide a permanent fix for this issue, but in the meantime, they have recommended a particular workaround. If you think you have been affected, please call JCS Tech Support who will be able to assist in installing the workaround.

Mail Merge Problems

This problem can affect users of Word 2013 and earlier. When attempting to perform a mail merge, after selecting a source, Word will shut down and fail to complete the mail merge. This problem can be caused by installing JCS version 28.101.08 (or higher), which uses Microsoft components incompatible with these older unsupported versions of Word. There is a simple workaround for this problem: convert the source .xlsx file to a .csv before attempting the mail merge. As Microsoft no longer offer support for Office 2013 we also are unable to fully support it, therefore we recommend that you upgrade to a later version of Microsoft Office.

Considerations Before Upgrading JCS

As with most major upgrades to software, the latest version of JCS does require more computer resources (RAM) that previous versions. 

Before installing, we recommend

  • You confirm with your IT that you have enough RAM available (minimum 2GB)
  • Microsoft Office 2016 or later. If you use Office 2013 or earlier and perform mail merges on the same PC as running JCS, please check you are happy with the workaround detailed above
  • Minimum screen resolution of 1280 x 800

The latest version of JCS is available here:

https://www.talkjcs.com/manual-update.html