Author: Steve Slisar

Steve Slisar has been training people how to use computers since 1994, opened a training centre in 1999 in Dee Why and by 2005 had 3 training centres and created over 35 individual courses that include Screen videos with audio commentary, training workbooks for those who prefer to read to learn, and exercise files that are used with the tasks in the workbooks so you get practical experience in the software you are trying to learn. Now the creator of 5 of the most popular online MYOB training courses in Australia.
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How much do you know about MYOB?

MYOB Quick free skills test and training

MYOB Quick free skills test and trainingTests are an excellent way to master new skills. If they are created with a learning outcome in mind they force you to answer based on your current knowledge and then provide you with an explanation of what the correct answer is and where you can go to find more.

We’ve recently updated our online MYOB training course to include over 80 knowledge review questions covering most aspects of operating MYOB software on a day to day basis. For each question we provide you with the correct answer and information about where you can go to review your knowledge and get it right the next time.

You’re invited to attempt a quick MYOB skills test to see how much you know.

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Microsoft Excel 2007 & 2010 Training – menus and ribbons

If you are receiving this as an email, click on the heading to see the free training video at the EzyLearn blog.

Microsoft Excel is still the worlds most popular spreadsheet program by a long shot. I’ve used Google’s spreadsheet and it is a fantastic tool if you want to access or share a spreadsheet online but it’s still not the same as using Microsoft Excel and with the prices becoming quite competitive and Microsoft offering new ways of sharing Microsoft Office documents in “the Cloud” it is still easier to use what you know, ie. Microsoft Excel.

We are in production of our 2010 Microsoft Office training videos as part of the beefing up of our online training courses and this videos is one of the new batch covering fundamental tools in Microsoft Excel 2007/2010.

If you wish to learn how to use Microsoft Excel at a beginner or intermediate level, Steve who created the training material will be teaching at Maxis Solutions training centre in Chatswood in February.

Are you new to online training courses? Check out our brief tour on how online learning works.

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LIFETIME membership for MYOB online training course

OldCoupleInLovebyErikclitgaad - lifetime MYOB and Excel training course We use the EzyLearn Blog to announce improvements, additions and updates to existing courses and training services and today we announce LIFETIME access to students who enrol into our MYOB Training Course from today onwards. This feature will be introduced to our other courses during the year.

It’s finally here. We’ve made some improvements to our MYOB Training course during the New Year period and are thrilled to announce the latest and greatest feature in online MYOB training. “Lifetime membership” for our online MYOB training course.

Lifetime membership means that after you have completed your course you are free to use the training site as a resource for the rest of your working life! As new content and online learning resources are created, you will have access to these resources for no extra charge.

If you agree with us that this offer is amazing share it on Twitter or Facebook and tell your friends. Otherwise head over to our online training course website to learn more about what we offer OR test your MYOB skills using our free MYOB online training skills test.

EzyLearn: That’s how easy it is.

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Recommend us for a reward

These days you can promote the fact you like something very quickly and easily. Twitter and Facebook accounts are free and almost everyone knows how to use them. Established blogging platforms like WordPress and Blogger are also easy and free to setup but there are even simpler microblogging platforms like Posterous.

What’s so good about all this new technology that is available? It means you can sign up for affiliate accounts and start earning money from referring good quality website to people you know or are connected to. Here’s a link to a post we wrote earlier this year which explains a bit about how affiliate marketing works.

We are trialling a new affiliate service for our online MYOB course and the reward is $25 for a successful sale from your recommendation. Don’t worry the affiliate management system keeps track of your referrals. Here’s a link to the affiliate website.

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How to create a new WordPress blog post

If you are receiving this as an email, click the title to watch our instructional video.

Today the hardest part of keeping your website up to date is not the technology about how to do it but the craft of writing the right words. The writers at HatchCreate understand the writing skills needed to make you look professional and bring traffic and sales to your website. They are versed with the use of the 123ezy website builder and the WordPress personal website publishing system.

We recently organised the hosting and creation of a simple website for the Australian Cartooning College and the video in this blog shows you how simple it is to create your own WordPress blog post.

It’s important to note the similarity between the term “blog post” and “news article”, or “update” because that’s all a blog post is. If you don’t consider yourself a blogger or that your business has a blog don’t worry these are just jargon used to make the art of writing articles sound modern and high tech. This article by Steve Slisar explains a bit more about WordPress and business blogs.

Many mums and dads working from home as remote contractors can earn a good living as a writer by performing the writing tasks to keep a company’s website or newsletter up to date. Once you learn how to manage blogs using WordPress you can promote yourself as a Website content manager. But remember, you need to be a good writer.

If you want to receive our blog post articles as an email when they’re published, enter your email address below.

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Steve training Excel and MYOB in December

If you are located in Sydney and want to attend an MYOB Day to Day Transactions course or Beginners Microsoft Excel 2007 before the festive season begins, you are in luck. Steve, who has created most of the EzyLearn content for computer software training is the trainer for the upcoming Excel and MYOB courses at Chatswood training centre Maxis Solutions.

Steve will use his humour and years of education experience to make the the learning of these software programs as simple and as quick as possible.

The one day courses are usually held on a Wednesday and you can enrol online using their secure and automatic enrolment service. Click the link below to enrol:

www.ezylearn.com.au/schedule

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MYOB Payroll – Employee Payment transaction video

The EzyLearn offer to MYOB students is simple. One price for access to all training resources (videos, workbooks and knowledge reviews) in a 12 month period including new updates. The MYOB Payroll course is part of www.myobcourse.com.au and it’s now ready for paying students to enrol. Included in this blog post is the 4th of 5 videos in part 1 of the course launched today.

This part of the course takes you through the sample company data file to highlight and explain how to navigate around and get information about employees, wages and other payroll categories, pay slips (Pay advices), pay cheques and other transaction information relating to Payroll.

If you are not already enrolled into the course you can choose the

  1. Full Access enrolment (no certificate), or
  2. Full Access enrolment (including assessment and certificate)

Enrol today!

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Earn money with phone bill analysis and Microsoft Excel

phone bill analysis example 2 - virion
phone bill analysis example - virion
phone bill analysis example - virion

One of the benefits of a spreadsheet is you can use a reasonably complicated spreadsheet over and over. One person goes to the effort of creating a spreadsheet and millions of people could potentially use that spreadsheet for a similar purpose.

The people at virion business grade voip have put a spreadsheet together to make it easier for them to perform price comparisons for their customers. The virion prices are fixed into the spreadsheet so all you need to do is enter in information about the costs on your phone bill and hey presto, phone bill analysis showing potential savings.

virion operates a distributed business model using “cloud based” software to manage and promote their business. Cloud computing is where your software operates over the internet, just like your banking and email applications like Hotmail and Gmail. Even powerful companies like MYOB are facing competition from cloud based solutions which are smaller, nimbler and more in tune with early adopters of new technology.

As part of the virion distributed business model they are seeking the help of remote contractors who are interested in earning money performing price comparisons for people they know as well as from leads provided by the company.

If you are interested in performing these tasks and earning money while working from home register as a remote contractor for further details as they come to hand.

If you want to take a look at the Microsoft Excel file that virion voip use for the phone bill analysis, please see the attachment to this blog post. Call Cost Comparison Spreadsheet v5 – RC

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Google saves you 2-5 seconds with Instant Search

The innovator in searching through millions of web pages to find the most relevant yesterday introduced Google Instant, a way of providing you with results before you’ve even finished typing. In other words Google has a pretty good idea what most people want to find when they start typing and reveals the results as you type. Great for slow typers this new feature will give you relevant results right there on your screen.

We are pretty proud of our search engine placement for online MYOB course so please feel free to do a search using the new Google Instant and see our website appear on the first page of search results.

I tried using the search and it was fascinating watching the search results change so quickly. When I tried it a second time it just worked like the normal Search results. Go and visit the Google Instant Search page or read Google’s announcement on their blog to learn more.

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What do you think? hmmm?

Social media is the craze these days. Web 2.0, interactive, personal and relevant are terms used to describe what you are looking for in your internet experience. We are interested in knowing what you think about our content and at the same time we want you to share your thoughts with others so we’re trialling a social commenting feature at the end of each post and we’d love to hear from you.

EzyLearn is trying a new service where you can comment on, recommend and share our training material with your network of friends or colleagues. You can see at the bottom of this post, under the Subscribe box, that you can log in using any choice of social networking services and make a comment about this or any other blog post.

Please let us know what you think about our blog posts, videos and training material.

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What is a Remote Contractor or Virtual Assistant (VA)?

Software as a Service (in the Cloud)

woman using mobile to find job in payroll, accounts receivable or administrationWITH THE ADVENT of fast speed broadband internet, software programs that operate “in the cloud” and telecommunications that use your internet connection, there’s no wonder the Remote Contractor market is growing.

In the Cloud explained

What is in the cloud, you ask? Well, it’s just like Hotmail or Facebook or your internet banking; secure services that you use on the Internet from anywhere in the world.

It’s easy to access and you don’t need to bring your computer with you if you don’t want to. Even programs like MYOB are moving to the cloud with their online product called Live Accounts. It’s also an interesting time for these companies because new and nimble competitors have an opportunity to grab a market share; take Xero online accounting (New Zealand company) for example.

There are online customer databases like SalesForce which companies use to keep track of their customers and Skype that allow personal users to make calls to other Skype users for free. These services enable you to work from where ever you are and enable employers to validate that you have logged in and performed the desired work so opportunities are coming thick and fast for home workers.

Remote Contractors and Virtual Assistants (VA)

Remote worker, home-based employment, virtual assistants and even Mumpreneurs (working mums and parents starting their own businesses) are some of the terms used to describe this type of work. Some of the work available is paid hourly pay or payment for specific tasks. Of course, it’s an ideal situation for working parents who need to earn an income while caring for babies and young children. But it’s also fairly in demand.

Courses built around employment outcomes

If you’re going to invest time and money in study and upskilling, it’s a given that you want to earn more money as a result, whether that be locally or in your home office. Our online training courses are designed with job outcomes in mind — our cloud accounting software courses in MYOB, Xero and Quickbooks are designed by professionals working in the industry so they know what the requirements are.

Our training courses include real life examples mirroring the everyday occurrences of real world businesses, and its becoming increasingly common for businesses to outsource work tasks to contractors working from home (think bookkeeping, telemarketing, graphic design, social media, content marketing and sales work).

What you study in our courses follows the logical flow of the how everyday businesses are run. Bookkeepers are as in demand as ever, and our courses are designed to help you set yourself up as a bookkeeper, working in an accounting practise, for yourself, or for someone else’s business.

If you’re considering a local position as a receptionist, or in administration or clerical or you enjoy bookkeeping work and want to find a job in accounts payable & receivable and payroll, we have courses for all skills levels from beginners’ to advanced.

Find out more about how we will help you earn more money

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VoIP Phone System from Virion

broadband speed test for voip phone system
is your internet fast enough for a voip phone system

We’ve updated our telephone system to the latest in Cisco IP phones and want to share the information with you because we think it’s ground breaking. We use our Broadband Internet connection to make and receive all our calls and that throws out the window the old concept of paying Telstra almost $40 per month just to have a telephone number. I was only just explaining to a friend today how the VoIP phone system from virion works and I’ll try to explain it again in this blog post.

Your Broadband Internet connection delivers the voice to your phones and takes it away to the people you call so this link is critical in the quality of your voip phone system. The best way of testing the quality of your broadband internet connection to run a speed test and see how fast your upload speeds are. Yes, I did say upload speeds. Most people want fast download speeds to download videos, emails and attachments, but with a voip phone system you need to have a broadband connection with good upload speeds.

In this diagram the upload speed is 0.81Mb/s (810Kbps) and the best quality VoIP phone system requires 87.2Kbps, so,theoretically 10 people in your office could be having phone conversations with your VoIP phone system using your broadband internet. But what if someone is sending an email with a huge attachment? I’ll keep you up-to-date with our VoIP experience as we use it.

If you want to test a business grade VoIP phone system and VoIP service take advantage of virion’s Instant Trial.

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How to convert a document or spreadsheet into a PDF file

If you are receiving this post as an email, click on the heading to go to our blog site and see the video that comes with it.

The benefits of a PDF file are:

  • most computers in the world will open it,
  • it maintains the look and feel of anything you can view on the screen and
  • it stops people from editing your files

Adobe Systems Incorporated are the owners of the PDF (Portable Document Format) standard and they have traditionally made money by making the viewer program available for free, but charging for the program which actually creates the PDF files. This is common with many other programs like Flash (for website animations) where you can download a player to view them, but you have to buy the software if you want to create them.

There are a number of applications available which allow you to easily convert any file you can print into a PDF. These files don’t necessarily have the full functionality that is available with the Adobe Acrobat “creator” software but many people don’t need these features.

The program we have found is CutePDF and the video attached to this post (click here or on the title if you are viewing this as an email) shows you how to download the program, install it and use it to convert files to PDF. Please feel free to send us some comments if you know of a better product or want to share your experiences.

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The admin area of a cartoon WordPress website

Cartooning can be a fun exercise, but it’s also a powerful way to get an idea or message across as Steve, Director of EzyLearn, discovered. “Cartooning involves picking the parts of a scene that stand out the most and exaggerating or highlighting it, sometimes it can be flattering sometimes uncomfortable” says Steve after completing a cartooning course with Gray Hopgood. “There is a surprising amount to understand and with practice I’ve started to see the results of these new found skills” says Steve.

The Cartooning College has provided cartooning courses for kids, adults and specialised markets who have used the courses to enable disadvantaged people express themselves creatively. They have created a new website built on the WordPress Content Management System (CMS) and Steve has produced some instructional videos about how to administer a WordPress site using the newly created website for the Cartooning College. Their website is www.cartooningcollege.com.au.

“I realised the power of cartoons back in 1992 when I had a british cartoonist called Johnjo draw a caricature of my face in my logo. It became an icon in Sydney’s Northern Beaches (with the aid of much newspaper advertising over the years)” confirms Steve.

The initial video of this course is included in this post so click on the title to go to our blog and watch the video to understand about creating and managing posts using WordPress. If you want to have your own WordPress website and learn the skills in a practical example take advantage of our 123ezy Webmasters course:.

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The right heading can bring people to you

The right heading on a flyer or a document will let you know immediately if that information on that page is “relevant” to you. It’s no different with a website. When you do a search in Google you decide in second which of the search results to go to depending on what they write in their title and description. Click the link in this blog post title to watch our video on Search Engine Optimisation.

EzyLearn offers the 123ezy website builder as part of a website hosting package and it makes it so simple to add (and change) words to the heading and description of each page within your website. Visit the 123ezy website for more information or take a look at a website that he been created using the SiteBuilder to see how it works.

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Blind man and smart trainer help people learn

Most blog posts we write at this website provide information about the computer training tools we develop, but this post is dedicated to two people that we have worked with and love for what they do for the people around them. Both of these people work in the education and training market and come highly recommended to anyone seeking their services.

Ross Miller is blind and has been for much of his life. He’s intelligent and dedicated and travels around Sydney and Australia helping people who are injured at work gain the skills they need to perform and find new jobs. It is an inspiration to work with Ross because despite his seeing disability he is pro-active in every aspect of helping find his clients work. His website is http://www.careerprofiles.com.au/.

The lady that we’d like to thank is Barbara Smith from Roving Trainer. Barbara worked at our first training centre that opened in Dee Why in the year 2000 and helped build a professionalreputation for a very small business at the time. Coming from a corporate training background, Barbara added a level of professionalism that all her students enjoyed and empathy that ensured her students learnt. Barbara is now training people in sunny Port Macquarie so please look her up if you need help in that area.

There are plenty of other people that we’d like to thank and you’ll hear about their story in the coming months. If you have had a success story using EzyLearn training courses or a someone who recommended us, please make a comment or send us an email.