Day-of guide
How to make a wedding seating plan
A seating plan is where a guest list stops being a number and becomes a room. This guide covers how to plan tables for a Malaysian wedding, and how the Wishes2Vows table planner turns your RSVPs into a drag-and-drop floor plan you can print for the door, the caterer and the emcee.
By the Wishes2Vows team Updated: 4 min read
1. Before you start seating
Seat guests after replies have mostly settled, usually in the last two or three weeks. Seating too early means re-seating every family that changes its numbers. Ask your venue or caterer for the table count, how many seats each table takes, and where the stage, the buffet line, the entrance and the photo corner sit.
- Put both sets of parents and the eldest relatives at the tables nearest the stage.
- Keep wheelchair users and the elderly near an exit and away from the speakers.
- Seat families together, and seat friend groups by how they know you: school, work, the kampung.
- Leave one or two tables loosely filled for walk-ins and the guests who bring an extra person.
Tag guests in your guest list first, for example VIP, Wheelchair, Elderly, Bride's Family and Groom's Family. Tags travel with the guest, so they are already marked when you start seating.
2. The guest pool fills itself
The table planner comes with the Grand package. You plan one event at a time, and for each event the planner lists exactly the people who said yes to it, one chip per family that opens to each person. A reply for a party of four becomes four people in the pool.
Nobody types the list twice. When a guest changes their reply, the pool follows. A guest who is on your planned list but has not replied does not get a chip until they reply or you add their reply yourself, which is a good prompt to chase the last stragglers before the plan is final.
3. Lay out tables and drag guests on
Start with the room. Add tables to the canvas, set how many seats each one has, and add venue elements such as the stage so the plan looks like the hall. Layout presets give you a first arrangement to adjust, and snap guides keep rows straight.
Then drag guests from the pool onto tables, with a mouse on a computer or a press-and-hold on a phone. Drag a whole family and only the members without a seat move, so you never split a family by accident. A find palette jumps straight to a guest or a table by name, which matters once there are forty tables on screen.
- Rubber-band select to move many tables and elements at once.
- Group tables and elements so they move together, and lock a group in place.
- Undo the last 30 changes if a drag goes wrong.
4. What is saved, and where
It helps to know which parts of the plan follow you to another device. Table positions, the seats per table and every guest's seat are saved to your account, so your partner or coordinator signed in on another phone sees the same plan.
| Part of the plan | Saved to |
|---|---|
| Tables, their positions and seat counts | Your account |
| Which guest sits at which table | Your account |
| Venue drawing (stage, walls and other elements) | This device, with an export file to move it |
| Groups of tables and elements | This browser |
If you draw the venue on a laptop and then want it on a tablet, export the drawing to a file from the planner and import it on the other device.
5. Print what you will hold on the day
The print pack opens the pages you need for the day, each through your browser's print dialog, so you can print on paper or save as a file from there. Print pages for one event at a time when your events have different guests.
- A guest checklist for the door.
- Table assignment sheets: who sits at each table, for the ushers.
- A master layout of the whole room, for the caterer and the emcee.
- The vendor sheet, so the people setting up have every contact on one page.
The printed table assignments are the easiest thing to hand to a caterer who builds their own table cards.
Common questions
Do I have to add guests to the seating plan by hand?
No. Everyone who replied yes to an event appears in that event's guest pool automatically, grouped by family.
Can I plan seating on my phone?
Yes. Press and hold a guest to start dragging, then drop them on a table.
Will my partner see the same seating plan?
Tables and seat assignments are saved to the account, so yes. The venue drawing is saved on the device it was drawn on; export it to a file to move it.
Can I print the seating plan?
Yes. The guest checklist, table assignments and master layout print through your browser, so you can also save them as a PDF.