Category: Online Excel Training

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What’s New in MS Office 2013? Here’s a Quick List

Frequent updates and infrequent use of software like Excel can really leave you stumped - that's where Lifetime Membership comes in real handy!
Frequent updates and infrequent use of software like Excel can really leave you stumped – that’s where Lifetime Membership comes in real handy!

At EzyLearn we offer online training courses for MYOB — the #1 Cloud-accounting software — but did you know we also offer training in Microsoft Excel and Word?

Just as we do with our MYOB training courses, we also offer Lifetime access to our MS Excel and Word training courses, which means each time Microsoft releases a new version of MS Office, we update our course content so you’re always totally up to date with the latest versions of Word and Excel.

Keeping Excel in Your Memory

Let’s be straight up here; once you get the hang of Word you probably won’t need to refer back to our course content all that much. Excel, on the other hand, is a different ball game.

In many ways Excel is a lot like algebra or a foreign language: if you don’t use it often, you’ll forget it. Sure, you’ll remember bits — J’adore Dior! E = mc2! — but you’re likely to struggle through your day-to-day if it’s something you rely on heavily at work.

Because many people use accounting software like MYOB, their use of Excel is fairly infrequent. For instance, suddenly trying to create a PivotTable will probably leave most of us stumped! And let’s not forget that by the time most users have mastered how to create macros in their worksheets, Microsoft will have released a new version of MS Office and we’ll be back to square one again. This, in large part, is a key reason why we offer Lifetime access to our training courses— because we, just like you, also forget stuff.

New Features in New MS Word and Excel (in a Nutshell)

Now that Microsoft has released their highly anticipated MS Office 2013, it’s likely you won’t be able to find the ‘Paste Special’ button again, so we’re updating our course content to reflect the new changes.

Here’s a low-down on some of the new features in the new MS Word and Excel:

Word:

  • Open and edit PDF files in Word – finally! Gone are the days of having an additional piece of software installed on your PC to enable this.
  • Threaded review comments
  • Read mode with page turning
  • Alignment guides – hallelujah! Why have they never had this before!
  • Placeholder

Excel:

  • Quick analysis
  • Flash fill – we’ve always had this to an extent, but flash fill just got a whole lot more intelligent!
  • PowerView – for the real Excel pro, but still a welcome addition.
  • New PivotTable tools
  • Improved functionality when opening new Excel windows
  • Recommended PivotTables and charts
  • New chart controls
  • Get a link
  • Publish Excel data to social media – we don’t recommend using this often, because snore. But it’s still great if you want to quickly share your yoy sales results with your Twitter followers or Facebook friends.

So whether you’re using MS Office 2013, 2010 or prior, if you’ve forgotten how to do a VLOOKUP, it’s time you educated yourself in the mystery that is Excel — enrol in one of our Microsoft training courses today!

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Be Happy: Start a Business and Work From Home

You may find that one of the key benefits of starting your own business is that your work actually makes you much happier.
You may find that one of the key benefits of starting your own business is that your work actually makes you much happier.

Are you toying with the idea of starting a virtual or home-based business? Well EzyLearn is your one-stop training-shop for everything you need to start a business — all via our Small Business Management training course, MYOB training courses, WordPress training courses and MS Office training courses.

But what are the real benefits of working from home? Continue reading Be Happy: Start a Business and Work From Home

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What is Teleworking?

Teleworking from home in Australia - NBN

In a nutshell, teleworking is the ability for employees to work remotely, usually from a home office, rather than travelling to the workplace. And it’s something that Australia, and indeed, the rest of the world has been moving towards for some time.

If you think about it, ever since the widespread adoption of email, the wheels have been in motion for an era where people could opt to work from home rather than commuting to the workplace every day.

For a while, though, it has been a bit of a logistical nightmare. If you’ve ever tried to work remotely before, then chances are, at some point you’ve uttered one or all of these complaints: “This file is too large for me to email”, [quote]I don’t have that software installed on my home PC[/quote]  or “My Internet’s really slow. I might as well just come into the office”.

But when you throw things like broadband Internet, laptops, tablet devices, smart phones and the latest little life-saver, cloud accounting and storage software (like Dropbox) into the mix, working remotely, or teleworking, slowly but surely got easier.

The benefits of teleworking to employees and employers, plus also to the Australian government are huge, which is why the Australian government spearheaded the move to a National Broadband Network (NBN), which, when rollout is complete, will see high-speed Internet cabled into nearly every Australian home (93%).

The NBN will give you the freedom to things like enrol in distance education or complete one of our MYOB courses, work from home, or even start a home-based business without having to worry about poor or unreliable internet coverage.

Teleworking is the future of all Australian workplaces – you can learn about the benefits of teleworking here.

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Online MYOB Courses with a 30-Day Money-Back Guarantee

MYOB Training Courses with 30 Day money back guarantee

Full Money-Back Guarantee

IF YOU’RE FAMILIAR WITH our online MYOB courses you might recall that we offer a money-back guarantee. We’ve always offered this guarantee because online training is still a relatively new phenomenon for many students. Perhaps these students would still prefer some one-to-one, personal attention from a tutor in a class-based training course.

Our original money-back guarantee was for 7 days, but after speaking with a handful of new students they seemed anxious that they didn’t have enough time to get around the course to see if it’s right for them. Some of our fastest students manage to get through the entire course within 5 days, most people get through it in 2-3 weeks, but regardless of how fast or slow you learn, all new students have the 30 day money-back guarantee.

We also offer the 30-day money back guarantee because we think we offer the most comprehensive MYOB courses available in Australia. Our online MYOB training includes:

  • 5 MYOB courses (Set Up to Payroll)
  • 7 training workbooks (some MYOB courses have 2 workbooks)
  • 7 different case studies (each workbook takes you through another example of how MYOB accounting software is used)
  • Over 250 training videos
  • Several MYOB versions (version 15 to 19, as well as the latest version 2012)
  • Knowledge Reviews to test your skills regularly throughout the course
  • 12 month’s or Lifetime Access so you can use the MYOB courses as an ongoing resource.
  • FREE student membership to the Institute of Certified Bookkeepers (ICB)

 

Our MYOB courses will give you confidence whether you:

  1. are applying for a job that requires MYOB
  2. want to be more useful in your current job OR
  3. want to start (or better manage) your own small business

Our new 30-day money-back guarantee shows how confident we are in the value of our online training courses. Find out more about our MYOB training courses. Enrol today and start by 5pm next business day.

online bookkeeping courses to earn cpd points

EzyLearn Excel, MYOB and Xero online training courses count towards Continuing Professional Development (CPD) for bookkeepers and accountants. We’ve been an accredited training provider of the Institute of Certified Bookkeepers ever since the organisation started in Australia. Find out how CPD points can be of benefit to you.

 

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Satisfaction Statistics for online MYOB Training Courses

Our offer and your satisfaction

EzyLearn Support Satisfaction Statistics for MYOB training coursesWe strive for an innovative training experience for our Microsoft Excel and MYOB training courses by providing:

  • Beginners to advanced software training skills for one price so you don’t have to agonise over which course to choose for your current skill level
  • Lifetime access to course resources including updates
  • Variety of learning tools including training videos, workbooks with exercises, exercise files and knowledge reviews

As a result it is important for us to develop training materials that are easy to use and self explanatory so that our students learn quickly and we don’t need to provide too much support. We need to ensure that any problem a student faces is dealt with so that future students are guided more smoothly through their learning experience.

Sometimes it’s the software

Zendesk customer support for our online MYOB training courses

I wrote in a recent blog about the significant changes that MYOB are going through with their software and how it affects not only our students but real, live businesses that use MYOB software in day-to-day operations. We’ve experienced this most recently in our MYOB bank reconciliation course where we exported the accounts list and journal entries from a previous version of MYOB so that students can easily import them into the current version. This worked very well for all the previous versions until MYOB started developed their current versions using the Microsoft .NET platform.

After going through several scenarios about how to improve the flow of our course and scouting MYOB’s support communities we’ve discovered that importing from previous versions to the current version is a little more difficult than it use to be. Students will just need to create the data manually and this isn’t a major problem, but it highlights some of the issues that are faced in the real world anyway.

But what can we do?

To handle our growing number of student members (and we call you members because you have lifetime access to the course materials including the new updates) we implemented a powerful customer support system called Zendesk, a system that is used by over 20000 companies world-wide including Twitter, msnbc.com, Denver Broncos, Lonely Planet, and SAP. We also turned on the satisfaction ratings which scared us at first because we would truly see how well we are doing according to our students. The result? 90% Customer satisfaction – that’s a high distinction I believe.

Why write a blog post about it?

tim tams and coffee at Sydney training centre
Source: http://annychih.com/the-best-job-in-the-world/testing-out-tim-tams/

There are several aspects to learning that most people are used to:

  • Training that is easy to follow and easy to duplicate so you can do it yourself
  • Training material to answer most of your questions
  • The social experience of meeting other people and sharing stories during the coffee break

Sadly, online training can’t provide the thousands of personal experiences our trainers experienced with their students during the coffee breaks, while eating Tim Tams. It’s this human contact element that we can’t replicate online so we closely watch the satisfaction ratings for the answers and support that our team provide to students when they have questions or difficulties.

We can’t replicate the coffee and Tim Tams online, but we can implement leading support tools and find great team members so we maintain a high distinction in support.

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Congratulations to our new MYOB Bookkeeper graduates

MYOB Training Courses in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide, BrisbaneOur most recent MYOB Bookkeeper Training and Microsoft Excel Course graduates have just received their certificates and going through the records it was fantastic to see how many people we are able to help from all over Australia.

When we operated our Sydney training centres in Dee Why (near Brookvale), Gordon (near Chatswood), Parramatta and Burwood we noticed that students would travel a long way to come to our training centres. I won’t even get started about how they would have to try to find somewhere to park, with parking time limits etc etc.

In looking at our recent graduates it gives me a great feeling to know that we are teaching people all over Australia and New Zealand to use MYOB to help them find bookkeeping/accounting jobs or starting their own bookkeeping businesses. Here’s where some of our recent students live and what they said about the course:

Samantha from Agaston, South Australia

Agaston is near Nurioopta, Williamstown and Gawler

The fact that I could start and continue the course when I had the time. It was easy to understand and use.

Wendy from Surry Hills (Sydney), New South Wales

Surry Hills is near Paddington, Alexandria and Haymarket

I can study at my own time

Beverly from Butler, Western Australia

Butler is very North Perth, near Joondalup

Being able to learn at my own pace online.

Geoff from Epping, Victoria

Epping is surrounded by Bundoora, Campbellfield and Craigieburn

Learning more about short cuts and the really powerful nature and depth available in Excel, particularly in Course 303, was most enlightening and beneficial.
Really appreciate the learning at your own pace aspect and the lifetime course and excellent material content. Thank you so much for such an excellent course presented at an affordable price.

Anne-Maree from Sippy Downs, Queensland

Sippy Downs is near Buderim, Mooloolaba, Maroochydore and Caloundra, north of Brisbane

Nice short videos so you could take breaks and it wasn’t hard to find a certain video if you had to look back over something

Rebecca from Wodonga, Victoria

Wodonga is near Albury on the NSW and Victoria border

Easy to navigate around the site. I liked the short video presentations. If I was interuppted for whatever reason, you never missed too much and it was easy enough to replay.

Carmen from Ruse, New South Wales

Ruse is south west of Sydney, past Prestons and near Campbelltown and Narellan

The sort videos, easy to process and understand the information when presented this way.

 

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Video: Reconcile your bank account to your MYOB datafile

We use this blog to provide some free samples of our training materials as well as inform readers about the features of our online MYOB and Microsoft Excel Training Courses. Today I am going to demonstrate the key features about performing a bank reconciliation using MYOB and how our EzyLearn ANSWER student support service helps bookkeeping students.

A bank reconciliation in MYOB is what brings your MYOB datafile back to reality. Your bank statement shows the truth about what money has gone into and out of your bank account and provides you with the blueprint you need to reconcile your MYOB accounting system. The video below demonstrates that once you have performed all your Day-to-Day Transactions a bank reconciliation makes sure that you have entered all the information you need to. At the end of a bank reconciliation your MYOB data is correct and you can start to run reports and get some great up-to-date information about your business.

MYOB releases new versions of their software most years and usually at the beginning of each new tax year to coincide with new PAYG tax tables and they are currently going through a race to the cloud to compete with many new startups like Xero, SAASU, Reach Accounting and FreshBooks. Some times these upgrades haven’t gone smoothly and students ask us how to perform actions in our training workbooks using MYOB. To help students in these scenarios we launch EzyLearn ANSWERS in May 2011 and this is one of the results we release via our blog. There are many other support blogs we’ve written so feel free to search our blog for answers.

If you have subscribed to our blog and are reading this via email, click on the heading to get to our website to see the free training video.

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Do you want to see the results of our online MYOB quiz attempts?

Learn how to make the most of MYOB bookkeeping softwareWe’ve made a simple online MYOB quiz available for anyone who wants to test their MYOB bookkeeping skills. It’s a very simple test designed to show people how online knowledge tests work and also have some fun and see how much they know. We did an export of all the results (minus the students details of course) and you can see them in our Microsoft Excel Training Course.

These test results show how long it took students to complete the test, their results, overall score and more and the datafile is available in our Microsoft Excel Course 308 which includes:

Understand 3D formulas between worksheets, cleaning up data using advanced filter, create a pivot table and change the value field settings, create a pivot chart to visually show the stats, using advanced functions like CHOOSE, VLOOKUP, HLOOKUP, MATCH and INDEX, look at advanced functions within functions (Nested Functions) and how to protect the worksheet and workbooks

The knowledge reviews in our online training courses are much bigger and more complicated and they provide us with a great tool to identify areas of difficulty for students and help us constantly update and improve our MYOB training courses.

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Does your business innovate or compete?

Red Ocean Blue Ocean from Dr Sarah Laytons Blog
Red Ocean Blue Ocean from Dr Sarah Laytons Blog

At a recent business owners breakfast I heard someone speak about blue ocean and red ocean strategies. I’m going to write some blog posts about how to build your business as part of our project to help our MYOB students start, maintain and build their own bookkeeping businesses and this article is a fitting way to start.

The Blue Ocean strategy involves finding new demand in an uncontested market which essentially means to innovate. This essentially means create something new, but I think for many small business it could means package your services so that you can demonstrate a difference between your bookkeeping business and others. The Red Ocean strategy is all about competing head to head with your competitors to try to get existing customers to move away from someone else to use your services. You can get a better idea of what Blue Ocean strategy is at their website.

We try to innovate in our services by offering lifetime access to all courses, provide all skill levels in one course (ie. beginners to advanced) so you don’t have to waste time trying to figure out which level you are at and provide different versions of training for Microsoft Word and Excel (ie. 2000, 2003, 2007 and 2010.

This table shows the key differences between the strategies. See which strategy you are pursuing.

Are you looking at starting or growing your business?

Cert IV small business management coming soonDo you want to start a business? Do you want to create a business plan? Does it all seem a bit daunting?

[quote]We are working with Maggie Richardson, author of “Starting a business in Australia” to get her Cert IV in Small Business Management online.[/quote]

This course not only gives you a well rounded education of the requirements to start and build a small business, but you will end up with one-to-one help in creating a business plan as part of the course! Read more..

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Did you get your electricity bill?

Electricity prices powerpoint, energy efficiency and Microsoft ExcelThere was a letter from the Energy company sitting on my desk today. I took a deep breath, prepared myself for a new invoice and opened it. To my pleasant surprise there was no bill, instead I received a letter with an accompanying brochure, warning me of my impending bill.

But it wasn’t really a brochure, it was my terms and conditions. I am certain that I had seen this before so why did they send it again? What I was most impressed with was how they sent these terms and conditions. Rather than send them in fine print on lengthy A4 pages it came in the form of a brochure. That alone made sifting through them easy to digest – very smart Tru Energy.

We thought we would use this opportunity to share with you a great story about how one company, EnergyAction used our Excel training course at a training centre near their Sydney office in Parramatta, to teach their employees how to create excellent spreadsheets that demonstrate how much money they can save on their electricity costs.

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Should we offer MYOB Training Courses to group buying companies?

group-buying-sites-choice-review-discounted-MYOB-training-course
Image from Choice website

We’ve been approached by many different Groupon type companies. There seems to be hundreds of these sites popping up every day and they are famous for offering you almost unbelievable discount coupons for almost anything but most commonly services like pedicures, restaurant and cafe meals etc. We’ve always ensured our prices are competitive and bookkeeping students receive good value for money, but our Training Partners have tried them and we’ll share their opinions with you.

For business owners (or merchants as we are called) group buying sites promote the possibility of receiving hundreds of sales of your product (so you better make sure you can service the demand) but what do they want in return. Here’s a classic scenario:

Normal Price: $200

Group Buying Price: $100

Saving to you: $100

Margin that goes to the Group Buying Site is typically 50% of the discounted price, ie. $50

This means that a merchant that would normally receive $200 for something, will now receive $50! Is it worth it? Then why not just sell it on special for $100 and spend some money advertising it? As you can see, we are pessimistic about the future of group buying sites. Our training partners workface.com.au offered a discount on their Microsoft Excel training courses only to receive a handful of sales.

choice_group_buying_reviewAnd there are hundreds of these group buying sites. See if you can recognise some of these names: Cudo, Groupon, AlltheDeals, Spreets, Living Social, Grabone, BizzBuzz etc. At the beginning of 2011 a local Australian startup in the space was sold for $40M! If you have time read a review by Choice Magazine.

The main reason we don’t like the big group buying sites is because of some of the conditions imposed.

When you buy the discount voucher the group buying site earns the money. Some of the more selfish sites will then only pass this money to the merchant when the customer uses the voucher. In other words, if the  customer doesn’t use the voucher within the “valid period” the merchant earns nothing and the customer loses the benefit!

By the way, I was at a software training function last week and a birdy told me that consumer protection laws might come into affect that provides protection for buyers of these discount vouchers – if you buy a $50 product then you can receive $50 off after the offer period has expired. Watch this space…

As far as discount coupons, we make them available to you. Just tell us what you are looking for in a training course and you’ll automatically receive a discount coupon code for our MYOB, WordPress and Excel training courses.

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Online is the way to go according to Woolworths

I was having a chat with a rehab consultant the other day and we discussed the benefits of online services like our online MYOB Training Courses and he reminded me about online shopping and having your weekly groceries delivered to your home.

We dug a little deeper and discovered that Woolworths announced a 118% increase in online sales for the December 2011 half year (July to June). When we went to the Woolworths Online Shopping site we saw all their branding for their Click and Collect service, but entered our postcode in the top right hand corner to discover that they would deliver to your door for $11 or less if you spent more than $100 with them. Do you think that is high?

I remember speaking to an Amway seller back around 1999 when the first online shopping “craze” began as part of the dotcom revolution where he mentioned that they sell all the products that are traditionally in the centre of the shop, the products that aren’t fresh and have long expiry dates. He pointed out that most people buy the same products every time they shop, that if you wrote up a list of things you need you could simply tick boxes and re-order all those products very quickly. Compare that to taking a trip to the supermarket!

A trip to the supermarket could involve the following steps and cost a lot more than $11 delivery:

  • Bringing children with you
  • Driving to the supermarket and looking for a parking space
  • Walking around the supermarket to get all the products you need
  • Waiting in a queue to pay and have your products bagged
  • Taking the shopping bags to your car to load up
  • Unloading the shopping from your car at home

It was at this stage that we realised also, why online computer training courses offer so many benefits over traditional courses held in training centres in Sydney or Melbourne. We recall that we needed to pay rent, wages, advertising and find good quality trainers. We had to schedule the courses 3-6 months in advance and try to guess the best date, day and time for students and THEN if we didn’t have at least 4 students attend a course we had to cancel it because it we wouldn’t cover our costs!

We realised we could give students more training (our current 5 MYOB training courses for example would take the equivalent of 4 full days of face to face training) if we delivered it online, and like a new student said to us just this week, the training is delivered consistently to every student. Every student learns exactly the same information the same way every time so it is great for franchise operators.

The best part is that we divert all our earnings into generating new and updated training content, and ensuring that our online training servers are operational and secure 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This means we can also focus on our LIFETIME student access offer and ensure that students can get on with the bookkeeping and administration tasks they need to do rather than having to do MYOB courses again and again to get the parts they missed.

We believe 100% in online services and look forward to helping your learn MYOB and other programs like Microsoft Excel and WordPress (website builder and blogging platform) online.

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Google Apps is now Google Drive. Is it better than dropbox?

Google Drive and smart devices storage in the cloudAs users of Google Apps, the EzyLearn Team are always interested in learning about new technology and how it can be used to increase productivity, reduce cost and allow us to do great new things.

We recently received a message that Google Docs is now Google Drive. They’re tying it all into Cloud based storage and services and it looks like a great move, but will we use it instead of Dropbox?

We recently wrote about MYOB in the Clouds, we use a small business telephone service that is in the cloud, our training courses are in the cloud and our website are built using a cloud-based website builder (WordPress) so it’s natural that we try to keep abreast of what the big technology players like Google are up to.

Below is a simple video (if you are reading this blog post via email, click on the heading to see the video at our blog site) that shows what you can do with Google Drive and all your devices including smartphones that are connected to the Internet. How does it compare to Dropbox? I agree with Ed Bott from the prolific technology writers at ZDNet.

Feel free to share your experiences on our Facebook Page

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We help you in the “Do More Make Less” Australia

Australian employment share by activity - bookkeeping services using MYOBWe were spilling through the recent federal budget information (as you would) and found some interesting facts that we wanted to share. We were actually looking for the new tax tables to explain more about how they work for our recently updated MYOB Payroll Course, but thought the information was enlightening. It’s also another reason to learn how to use MYOB so you can perform bookkeeping tasks!

We found it relevant because our online MYOB and Excel training courses provide education and new skills for individuals to participate in the provision of services in Australia’s knowledge based economy. Is all that jargon too much? It just means that more and more workers are being paid for using their brains and skills to perform tasks (like bookkeeping) and less on making or growing stuff.

You might also be reassured by our relatively low and constant unemployment rate.

And, just in case you weren’t aware, our online MYOB training courses include

  1. Training Videos
  2. Training workbooks with exercises and
  3. Knowledge review to test your skills

PLUS they come with LIFETIME student access so you can have access to new content as it is created for no extra cost.

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Most budding bookkeepers want to start learning MYOB at 12.30pm!

Excel Online Training Course 308 - pivot table value field settingsHow do we know that most students want to start their MYOB training course at 12.30pm? We put all our course enrolment information into an Excel spreadsheet, inserted a pivot table and then filtered the data. Does that sound simple? Well it will be if you enrol into our online Microsoft Excel course.

The good news is that the video tutorial below will show you exactly what we did. If you are reading this blog as an email subscriber click on the heading to get to our blog site to watch the training video tutorial. If you want to receive these blogs posts via email, make sure you subscribe to our Employment and Productivity Training Blog.

The other good news is that when you enrol into our online Microsoft Excel Training Course you actually receive the data file that we used in this exercise so you can replicate it yourself! These figures are for enrolments into our MYOB course, Beginners, and Microsoft Office courses at our Dee Why training centre when we operated class-based training centres in Sydney.

Like all our online training courses, the Microsoft Excel training courses come with LIFETIME student access. The current course not only includes training videos, but nine training workbooks and over 40 exercise files that you can use to practice your Excel spreadsheeting skills.

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Certificates are coming shortly

Congratulate all the students who successfully completed their MYOB Bookkeeping courses this quarter, your certificates are now been issued via our support site.

If you are contemplating our online MYOB training course you’ll be very happy to know that the EzyLearn MYOB Course certificate includes the logo for the Institute of Certified Bookkeepers (ICB). We are proud to be an Accredited Training Provider of the ICB and also of their their continuing professional development (CPD) program for bookkeepers. You may also recall that you can join the ICB as an EzyLearn student for free.

Make sure you subscribe to this blog for the pending announcement of our CPD training program for bookkeepers.

In the mean time you might also want to stay tuned for the pending release of our upgraded MYOB Payroll course, Advanced Microsoft Excel courses and updates to our Microsoft Word online training course. We’ll be releasing some free training videos shortly to show you what we’ve done.