Designing Seating Charts
The floor plan editor: tables, chairs, venue elements, and assigning guests to seats.
The seating chart is a floor plan you draw. Tables, chairs, doors and windows go on a canvas measured in feet, and guests are dragged onto the seats around each table.
It is the visual half of seating. The list half — assigning guests to tables quickly, in bulk — is seating assignments, and the two share the same underlying tables.
Charts
A wedding can hold several charts, shown as cards with Tables, Seated and Seating Progress on each. Create New Chart makes another; naming it happens in the dialog that follows.
More than one is genuinely useful: a ceremony layout and a reception layout, or two versions of the same room while the couple decides.
The editor
Down the left is the tool rail. Each tool adds one thing to the canvas:
| Tool | What it adds |
|---|---|
| Venue Elements | Ready-made fixtures — see below |
| Add Table | A table, in one of six shapes |
| Chair | A single chair |
| Decor | A plain rectangle, for anything not modeled |
| Door | A door marker |
| Window | A window marker |
Table shapes
Add Table offers Round, Rectangle, Oval, Serpentine, U-Shape and Hollow Square.
Serpentine and U-Shape matter more than they look: they are the two layouts people try to fake with several rectangles, and faking them makes the seat counts wrong.
Venue Elements
Eight fixtures you would otherwise draw by hand: Dance Floor, Bar, Buffet Table, Cake Table, Gift Table, DJ Booth, Stage and Photo Booth.
These are decor, not seating — they exist so the plan reads like the room. A layout with the dance floor and the bar on it tells you which tables are going to be loud, which is the sort of thing a couple asks about.
Selecting and adjusting
Selecting an element opens its settings on the right:
- Label — what the element is called on the plan
- Width (ft), Height (ft) and Position (ft) — exact dimensions and placement
- Rotate Left and Rotate Right
Everything is in feet, and Room Dimensions sets the size of the room itself. Getting that right first is what makes the rest of the plan mean anything — a canvas with no real dimensions is a drawing, not a floor plan.
Lock Shapes freezes the decor so you can work on tables without nudging the dance floor. It is on by default.
Putting guests in seats
Select a table and its guest panel opens. Guests are dragged onto seats — the panel says Drag to assign — and names appear around the table as you go.
A table with nobody on it says No guests at this table, and there is a search box for finding one person in a long list.
Keeping the chart and the list in step
The canvas and the assignments list are different views of the same tables, but a table drawn on the canvas is not automatically a table in the list. Reconcile Tables matches them up.
Run it after drawing a new layout, before you start assigning. Skipping it is the usual cause of a chart that looks finished while the assignments tab still says nobody is seated.
Templates
Manage Seating Chart Templates saves the current layout with Save Current Layout as New Template, and applies a saved one to a new chart.
Worth doing once for each way you actually set the room up. Most venues have two or three, and rebuilding them each season is wasted evenings.
Sharing and printing
Share Seating Chart gives a public link once Make Public is on. Allow Public Editing additionally lets signed-in people with access to that wedding change the chart through the link — it is not an invitation to the world.
The chart also exports to PDF from the editor.
What it does not do
No text labels — a piece of text on its own is not an element, so annotations have to go in an element's Label. No automatic layout from a guest count, and no collision checking: two tables can overlap and nothing will object.
Practical use
- Set Room Dimensions before you draw anything.
- Lay the room out first — bar, dance floor, doors — then add tables around it. The fixtures are what constrain the plan.
- Run Reconcile Tables before assigning anybody.
- Save a template the first time a layout works.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I add free-standing text to the plan? No. Text lives on an element's Label.
Why doesn't my chart's table appear in seating assignments? It has not been reconciled yet. Use Reconcile Tables.
Can the couple see the chart? If you switch Make Public on and send them the link.
How many charts can one wedding have? As many as you need.
Keep reading
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