Chair Numbers: What Your Printed Documents Show

Most of the work of a seating plan is deciding who sits together. A smaller decision sits underneath it: does the paper you hand people name a table, or a chair?

Every guest has a chair either way

This is the part that surprises people, and it is the key to the whole thing.

Drag a guest onto a chair and that is the chair they get. Drag them onto the middle of the table and the app fills a chair for them, in order, along with everyone else you did not place by hand. Either way your plan ends up with a seat for every seated guest, because a room full of tables is a room full of chairs.

So the chairs get decided whatever you do. The question is not whether your plan has seat positions. It is whether you wanted to be the one deciding them, and whether the printed document needs to say.

That number is the same everywhere it appears, by design: what the caterer reads off the sheet matches what you see on screen and what a guest sees on the share link.

Choosing chairs yourself

Worth the effort where the specific chair carries meaning:

• The top table. Position is the point. Who sits on which side of the couple is the decision, not an accident of drop order.
• Place cards printed with a seat. If the paper tells a guest which chair, you probably want to have chosen it.
• Long banquet tables. At a table of twenty, "same table" means nothing. Whether someone is at your elbow or nine seats away is the entire experience.
• A guest who needs a particular position. Near an exit, on the aisle side, away from the speakers, facing the room rather than the wall.

Everywhere else, dropping someone on the table and letting the app fill the chair is doing the same job with fewer decisions. Round tables where guests sort themselves out on the day are the clearest case.

One detail worth knowing: when you drag several guests at once, only the first takes the chair you aimed at. The rest land at the table. A multi-guest drag has one drop point, and three people cannot share a chair.

Leaving chair numbers off a document

Chair numbers are chosen per document, on the deliverables page, next to the download button. Untick Chair numbers and that document prints without them.

It is per document because the documents disagree:

• Place cards that name a chair need the number on them.
• An escort list at the door usually wants to send someone to a table and let them find a seat.
• A caterer sheet may want them, if plates go to positions rather than to a table.
• The thank-you list has no seating in it at all, so the option is not offered there.

The choice applies to the document you are downloading, not to your plan. Nothing you tick here moves a guest, and you can print the same plan two ways for two different people.

Changing your mind

Nothing here is a commitment. Placing someone in a specific chair does not lock them: auto-seat still rearranges the room around them like anyone else, and a plan you rearrange keeps working.

If you want a placement to survive a reshuffle, that is what the lock on a guest is for, and it is a separate, deliberate action.

If you are not sure

Drop people onto tables and let the app fill the chairs.

You can place a specific chair whenever a specific chair starts to matter - the top table, the one guest who needs the aisle - without going back and redoing anything. And when you print, decide then whether the document in your hand needs the numbers on it.