What this seating chart maker actually does
A useful seating chart answers two questions at once: where each table belongs in the room and where each person should sit. A spreadsheet can hold names, but it cannot show entrances, a stage, table spacing or the exact chair occupied by each guest. This planner combines the list and the floor plan in one workspace.
Start from a banquet, classroom or ceremony template, or build a blank room with round tables, rectangular tables and special areas. Move and resize every element, set its seat count, then drag a guest onto a specific chair. On a phone, select a guest and tap the chair instead.
Relationship rules are the practical difference. A pair can be marked as must sit apart, must sit together, preferably apart or preferably together. Auto-arrange treats the first two as hard constraints and uses the preferences to choose a better valid arrangement. It leaves a guest unseated when no valid chair exists instead of hiding the conflict.
Publish your seating chart anywhere
When the plan is ready, choose Embed plan to place a clean, read-only copy on a wedding website, classroom page or event site. Guest names are optional, and private planning details such as notes, meal choices, accessibility information and relationship rules are never included.
The embedded chart is a snapshot, so the public version will not change while you keep editing. Copy fresh embed code whenever you want to publish an updated plan.
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.
- Build the room. Pick a layout template or add round tables, rectangular tables and special areas. Drag, resize and rotate them until the floor plan resembles the real space.
- Add the rules you already know about. Record people who must be together or apart, then add softer preferences for pairings that are helpful but not essential.
- 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 individual chairs by hand, then print. Auto-arrange gives you a valid starting point; you still know things the tool does not. Download a private backup or print 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
In the free local planner, everything runs in your browser. The guest list, table layout and rules are saved in local storage so you can close the tab and come back later. Nothing is uploaded and no account is required unless you deliberately buy and use the optional Event Pass for that event. Without a pass, use a private backup to move the editable plan to another device, then print or save a PDF when it is ready.
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.