Why this instead of a spreadsheet
Nearly everyone starts a seating chart in a spreadsheet, and nearly everyone abandons it somewhere around the third revision. The reason is not that spreadsheets are hard. It is that the actual difficulty of a seating chart is not arithmetic — it is the handful of people who must not end up at the same table. A spreadsheet cannot know that, so every rearrangement means manually rechecking the same awkward pairs.
That is the specific problem this tool is built around. You tell it which pairs must stay apart, and from then on it treats those as hard rules: the automatic arrangement will never break them, and if you place people together by hand, the table is flagged immediately. Everything else — the drag and drop, the capacity counter, the printable output — exists to support that one idea.
How your data is handled
The free planner is local by default. Guest lists, class lists, table layouts and rules are stored in your browser and are not uploaded. This is a deliberate choice because guest lists and student names can be sensitive, and many users need nothing beyond a device they control.
An optional Event Pass creates an account and uploads one chosen event to provide cross-device saving and sharing. Without a pass, a chart made on your laptop will not automatically appear on your phone. Download a private JSON backup to move or preserve a local chart, and save a PDF when you need a printable version.
What it costs
The core planner is free to use, with no seat limits, no watermark on printed charts and no trial period. It does not carry advertising. A separate Event Pass is planned for optional cloud saving, cross-device editing and collaboration; the local planning tools described on these pages will stay free.