What this seating chart maker actually does
A seating chart is a plan showing which guest sits at which table. Most people start one in a spreadsheet, then give up somewhere around the fourth revision, because a spreadsheet cannot tell you that you have just put two people at the same table who have not spoken in three years. This tool exists to handle that specific part.
You paste names, set the number of tables and how many seats each one holds, and then assign people. There are two ways to assign: drag a name onto a table, or tap the name and then tap a table, which is what you will want on a phone. Every table shows how full it is, so you find out you are two seats short before you print anything rather than after.
The part that is different from most free tools is the keep-apart list. You choose two people, click Keep them apart, and from then on the tool treats that as a hard rule. Auto-arrange will never place them at the same table, and if you manually seat them together anyway, the table turns red and tells you exactly which pair caused it. Nothing is silently ignored.
How to build your chart in five minutes
- Paste the list. One name per line. If your names are in a spreadsheet column, select the column, copy, and paste it straight in — line breaks are handled for you, and so are commas and semicolons.
- Set your tables. Enter how many tables the venue has and how many seats fit around each. Eight seats per round table is the common default; long banquet tables are often ten or twelve.
- Add the rules you already know about. Divorced parents, an ex who got invited, the uncle who argues about politics. Add each pair before you start arranging, not after.
- Hit auto-arrange. It seats the most constrained people first, then fills the rest. Anyone it genuinely cannot place is left in the unseated area rather than forced somewhere that breaks a rule.
- Adjust by hand, then print. Auto-arrange gets you a valid starting point; you still know things the tool does not. Print or save as PDF when you are happy.
Why auto-arrange sometimes leaves people out
If someone ends up in the unseated area after auto-arranging, it means there was no table with a free seat that did not break one of your keep-apart rules. That is not a bug — it is the tool refusing to quietly do the thing you told it not to do. Usually it means one of three things: you need another table, you have set too many conflicting rules for the number of tables you have, or one person is in conflict with so many guests that they need a table built around them.
The fix is normally to add a table, raise the seats per table by one, or remove a rule you added defensively but do not really need. The counter under the table settings shows total capacity against list size, which tells you immediately whether the problem is arithmetic or arrangement.
Your guest list stays on your device
Everything runs in your browser. The guest list, the table layout and the keep-apart rules are saved in your browser's local storage so you can close the tab and come back to the same chart later. Nothing is uploaded, there is no account, and there is no copy of your guest list sitting on a server somewhere. The trade-off is that the chart lives on the device you built it on — if you switch computers, you start over, so print or save a PDF once you are happy with it.
Which version of the tool should you use
This page is the general version and works for any event with tables. There are also versions tuned for specific situations: the wedding seating chart maker uses wedding wording and defaults to round tables of eight, the classroom seating chart maker swaps tables for desk groups, and the random seating chart generator is for when you want a fresh shuffle rather than a considered plan. They share the same engine, so anything you learn on one page applies to the others.