What a wedding seating chart actually is
Most couples discover halfway through that they are making two different things, and the confusion costs an evening.
The first is the floor plan: tables arranged as they will physically sit in the room, with each guest assigned to a table. This is the working document. Your venue and caterer want it. It answers where table nine goes relative to the dancefloor, and who is sitting with your aunt.
The second is the seating chart guests read: the poster on an easel by the entrance. Nobody standing there in heels with a drink cares about geometry. They care about finding their own name in under ten seconds. A good poster is either grouped by table (Table 1, then the eight names beneath it) or listed A–Z with a table number beside each name.
Both come out of the same plan. Build the floor plan first, then generate the poster from it. If you have more than about 120 guests, the A–Z index is kinder. People scan for their surname rather than reading twelve table blocks.
Before you open anything
Two things save more time than any software.
- Ask the venue how many tables fit and what shape they are. Round tables of 150cm typically seat eight to ten; 180cm rounds usually take ten to twelve. Long banquet trestles vary wildly. Do not guess. A plan built on the wrong table count has to be redone.
- Get the guest list into one column of plain text, one name per line. Not a spreadsheet with seventeen columns. Not a group chat. One name per line, final RSVPs only. This is the single biggest time-saver, because you can paste it in one go.
If you want to sanity-check your table count first, how many guests per table covers the usual sizes and the amount of elbow room people actually need.
Building it in tablout, step by step
Open the planner. Nothing to install, no email box to fill in. This order works.
1. Lay out the tables: about five minutes
Add tables from the toolbar. There are seven shapes: round, rectangle, square, oval, U-shape, L-shape and banquet. Drag them into roughly the arrangement your venue described. You can resize, rotate, duplicate and rename each one, so the fastest route is usually to place one round table, set its seat count, then duplicate it eight times and spread the copies out.
Rename tables now rather than later. "Table 1" through "Table 12" is fine, but if you are using names like Oak, Willow or Rosemary, set them before you start seating people, so the poster reads correctly first time.
A note on honesty: tablout has no venue background image, no room dimensions and no stage or dancefloor objects. The canvas is a clean surface for tables. For most weddings that is enough, because the venue already knows where the band goes. If you need a scale drawing of the room, you want your venue's own plan, not this.
2. Paste the guest list: about one minute
Use the paste option in the sidebar and drop the whole list in at once, one name per line. If you add a comma and a group, as in Sarah Whitcombe, Family, the group is picked up automatically. Groups are colour-coded, and the defaults cover Family, Friends, Colleagues and Plus Ones, with custom ones if your list needs them.
Groups are not decoration. They are what auto-seat uses to keep the right people together, and they make the plan readable at a glance later, when you are staring at 140 names and cannot remember whose side someone is on.
Worked example. 96 guests, twelve round tables of eight. Paste the list with groups appended: 34 Family, 30 Friends, 22 Colleagues, 10 Plus Ones. Auto-seat fills the tables group by group. Family lands across five tables, Friends across roughly four more, Colleagues nearly three. You then spend fifteen minutes moving about a dozen people by hand: the cousin who should sit near her parents, the colleague who knows nobody. That last fifteen minutes is the part only you can do.
3. Auto-seat, then fix by hand: fifteen to twenty minutes
Auto-seat seats the whole list by group, best-fit, and tells you who did not fit. Each press re-seats everyone, so pressing it again gives you a different arrangement to compare rather than nothing. That report matters: if it says eleven people are unseated, you have a capacity problem, not a software problem, and you need another table or a bigger one. There is also a warning if your guest count exceeds your seat count, which catches the classic error of forgetting plus-ones.
Then drag people. Auto-seat gets the bulk arrangement right in seconds; it does not know that two guests have not spoken since 2019. Use the guest search to find a specific name quickly rather than scanning tables.
Handling the landmines. Open Seating rules in the guest list and use Keep apart to name any pair who must never share a table; auto-seat then routes around them, and leaves someone unseated with a note rather than breaking a rule. For two who should be together, use Sit together in the same place, or put them in the same group, which auto-seat already keeps together. If your situation involves separated parents, seating chart for divorced parents has the arrangements that tend to work.
4. Save the file: thirty seconds, and do not skip it
Your plan lives in your browser's local storage. That means nothing is uploaded and no account exists, but it also means clearing your site data wipes the plan. Use Save Project to download a .tablout.json file and keep it somewhere real. Email it to yourself, or drop it in your cloud folder. You can reopen it later, or on another machine. Only one plan lives in the browser at a time, so saving files is also how you keep two versions side by side.
5. Export what each person needs: five minutes
| Who | What they need | Export |
|---|---|---|
| Venue and setup crew | The table layout | Floor plan: free in print under 50 guests, in the print pack from 50 |
| Caterer or planner | A plain list to work from, with diets | Guest list as CSV or TXT (free under 50 guests, print pack from 50), or the caterer sheet (print pack) |
| Guests on the night | Names they can find fast | Seating chart poster, place cards and table cards (print pack) |
| You, next week | The editable plan | Save Project (.tablout.json) |
The poster has four print templates and comes in A2, A1, 18x24 or 24x36, arranged either by table or as an A–Z index. You see it free, clean and in full on screen, before you pay. The print-ready file is in the one-off €9.99 print pack: PNG at up to 300 DPI, less on the largest sheets and in Safari, plus a true-vector SVG, print-to-PDF and a 3 mm bleed PNG. The same pack holds the place cards, table cards and caterer sheet, all in the poster's design, and the print floor plan, the CSV and the TXT once the list reaches 50 guests. If you would rather skip the poster altogether, seating chart vs escort cards compares the two approaches honestly.
Roughly how long the whole thing takes
For a typical 100-guest wedding with a final list in hand: five minutes on tables, one minute pasting guests, twenty minutes of auto-seat plus manual adjustment, five minutes exporting. Call it half an hour for a first full draft.
What blows that up is not the tool. It is an unfinished guest list. If four households have not replied, you will build the chart twice. Wait for the RSVPs, or seat the confirmed guests and leave a table half empty on purpose.
The mistakes worth avoiding
- Seating by category alone. A whole table of colleagues who have never met is a quiet table. Mix one or two connectors into every group table.
- Forgetting the room. Older relatives away from the speakers; anyone with mobility needs near the door and on an aisle, not boxed in behind three chairs.
- Leaving one person as an odd number. A table of nine where everyone else has ten is fine. One guest alone at the end of a trestle is not.
- Printing too early. Somebody always drops out in the final week. Export the poster last.
There is a longer list at wedding seating chart mistakes, and if you are still deciding on the top table, head table vs sweetheart table lays out the trade-offs.
Common questions
- Do I need an account to use it?
No. There is no sign-up and no login. Open the planner and start placing tables. Your plan is stored in your own browser, not on our servers. The one exception is buying the print pack: Stripe takes an email address there so it can send you a receipt. What unlocks the pack on another device is the unlock code shown on the print pack card after payment, not the receipt.
- Can I tell it that two guests must not sit together?
Yes, for keeping people apart. Open Seating rules in the guest list, choose Keep apart and name the pair; auto-seat will not seat them at the same table, and if there is no legal seat left it leaves the guest unseated and says so rather than breaking the rule. Moving someone by hand can still break it, which shows as a warning. For the opposite, Sit together asks auto-seat to put two people at one table, as a preference it tries for rather than a rule it guarantees. Putting them in the same group helps too.
- What happens to my plan if I close the browser?
It stays in your browser's local storage and will be there when you return on the same device and browser. Clearing your site data or history removes it, so use Save Project to download a .tablout.json file as your real backup.
- Is the seating chart poster free?
Not as a download. The planner is free, and you see the poster on screen, clean and in full, before you pay. The print-ready poster is in the print pack, a one-off €9.99 payment, not a subscription: PNG, SVG, print-to-PDF through your browser, and a 3 mm bleed PNG. The pack also holds the place cards, table cards and caterer sheet, and the print floor plan, the CSV and the TXT for plans of 50 guests or more. Read the detail on what is free.
- How many guests can it handle?
The planner holds up to 1000 guests across up to 100 tables, so pasting a list of a few hundred names is normal; anything past the cap is reported as skipped rather than added. For very large weddings, see how to seat 100 guests for a workable order of operations.