Almost every discovery call we run starts the same way. Someone from HR or operations has budget approved, a rough headcount, and one question they’ve been going back and forth on internally for weeks: should we bring a trainer into the office, or just do this over Teams?

Here’s the honest answer up front: we deliver both, we charge for both, and we don’t have a horse in this race. After hundreds of group sessions in both formats, we can tell you neither one is “better.” But one of them is almost certainly better for your team, and it usually comes down to five questions most people never think to ask.

Let’s walk through it.

What onsite training actually gets you

There’s a thing that happens in a room that doesn’t happen on a video call, and anyone who’s run live training knows exactly what it is: the side question.

Somewhere around the first coffee break, someone walks up to the trainer with their laptop open and says, “This isn’t really on the agenda, but can I show you something?” It’s a report they’ve been fighting with for two years. It takes the trainer four minutes to fix, and that person goes back to their desk a convert. That moment alone has justified the travel cost for more than one of our clients.

Onsite sessions also solve the attention problem by brute force. Laptops are open to Excel, not email. Nobody is quietly triple-booked. The trainer can see the room, spot the person in the back who’s been stuck for ten minutes and hasn’t said anything, and walk over. That kind of individual catch-up is invisible on a call and effortless in person.

The tradeoffs are real, though. You’re paying for travel. You’re pulling everyone off the floor on the same day, which some operations genuinely can’t absorb. And you’re at the mercy of the conference room — we’ve lost a solid fifteen minutes to a missing HDMI adapter more times than we’d like to admit.

What remote training actually gets you

Remote training earned a bad reputation in 2020 because most of it was a webinar wearing a training costume: one presenter, ninety slides, a chat box nobody read.

Done properly, it’s a different animal. Screen sharing cuts both ways, so a trainer can pull up any attendee’s actual workbook and work through it while everyone watches. Sessions can be split into two or three shorter blocks across a week instead of one long day, which is honestly how most adults learn better anyway. Everything can be recorded, so the person who was out sick doesn’t miss it and everyone else can rewatch the Pivot Table section in October when they’ve forgotten it. And if your team is spread across four offices and two time zones, remote isn’t a compromise. It’s the only format that treats everyone equally.

The failure mode is just as real: the camera-off attendee who accepted the invite, joined the call, and spent two hours answering email. Remote training lives or dies on group size and interactivity. Past about fifteen people per session, it drifts toward webinar territory no matter how good the trainer is. We cap it deliberately for that reason.

The five questions that actually decide it

1. Where does your team physically sit? If everyone’s in one building, onsite is on the table. If you’re split across locations, remote (or a hybrid, more on that below) is usually the honest answer. Flying twelve people to headquarters for an Excel class is a hard expense to defend.

2. What are you training on? Formula fundamentals, Pivot Tables, and reporting skills translate to remote beautifully. Messier, more hands-on topics — automation projects, Copilot workflows where half the value is troubleshooting live against your own data — tend to benefit from a trainer physically in the room.

3. How wide is the skill gap? Every group has a range, but if yours runs from “still uses a calculator next to the keyboard” to “writes VBA for fun,” in-person makes it much easier to keep both ends engaged. On a call, the struggling folks go quiet and the advanced folks check out.

4. Can your operation absorb a full day offline? Onsite usually means one concentrated day. Remote lets you break training into half-day or two-hour blocks so nobody’s inbox catches fire. For customer-facing teams, that flexibility often decides the whole thing.

5. What does your culture do to a video call? You know your people. If your all-hands meetings are a wall of muted mics and black squares, be realistic about what a remote training session will look like. If your team is remote-native and engaged on calls, you’ll lose very little by skipping the travel.

The part that matters more than the format

Here’s the uncomfortable truth about corporate Excel training: the format is the second-biggest variable. The biggest one is whether the agenda was built for your team or pulled off a shelf.

A generic Excel course teaches your accounting team how to make a mortgage calculator. A good one teaches them how to fix the month-end reconciliation file they already hate. Before any session we run, onsite or remote, we get on a call, ask what your people actually do all day, and collect a few of the real spreadsheets they work in (scrubbed of anything sensitive). Then we build the exercises around those. Attendees notice the difference within the first twenty minutes, and it shows up in the feedback every single time.

So whichever format you’re leaning toward, ask any training provider you’re evaluating one question: “Will you customize the agenda to our files and workflows?” If the answer is anything other than an immediate yes, keep looking.

The third option nobody asks about

A pattern we see more and more with our corporate clients: an onsite kickoff day to build momentum and handle the wide skill gaps in person, followed by shorter remote sessions over the following weeks to go deeper on specific topics — Power Query for the finance group, Copilot for the analysts, dashboards for the managers.

It costs less than multiple onsite days, keeps the energy of in-person training, and gives people time to apply what they learned between sessions instead of drinking from a firehose once and forgetting most of it by Friday. If you’re torn between formats, this is usually the answer.

The bottom line

Pick onsite if your team is in one place, the skill range is wide, the topics are hands-on, and you want maximum engagement in a single day.

Pick remote if your team is distributed, you need scheduling flexibility, you want recordings, and your group is small enough to stay interactive.

Pick both if you have the budget for a kickoff day and want the training to actually stick.

And whichever you choose, make sure the agenda is built from your spreadsheets, not someone’s template.

Frequently asked questions

How many people can be in one group Excel training session?

Onsite, we’ve trained rooms from 5 to 30, though 12–20 is the sweet spot. Remote, we recommend capping sessions around 15 so the trainer can still work with individual attendees’ screens.

How long is a typical group session?

Onsite sessions usually run a half or full day. Remote training works best broken into two- to four-hour blocks scheduled across a week or two.

Can you handle a group with very mixed skill levels?

Yes, and it’s the most common situation we see. We typically run a short skills survey beforehand and structure exercises with a base task plus a stretch goal, so beginners aren’t lost and advanced users aren’t bored.

Do you customize the training agenda?

Every session. We hold a planning call before training, review sample files from your team, and build the exercises around your actual reports and workflows, whether the session is onsite or remote.