Free seating chart maker

Plenty of tools call themselves free and then stop you at the moment you have something worth keeping. Here is the honest split: everything up to and including a finished, auto-assigned chart costs nothing and needs no email address.

Payment starts where the chart leaves your screen. Saving it to the cloud, exporting it without a watermark, and sharing a link where people look up their own seat are the paid parts.

Pick event mode and you get round tables, rectangular tables and a head table that the assignment never touches. Pick classroom mode and you get desks in rows, desks in pairs and U shapes, with a front row you can reserve.

The underlying document is the same either way, so a chart you started as a banquet can be rearranged into rows without starting over.

The reason seating takes so long is not the first draft. It is that the first draft has to be redone every time the list changes, and all the careful exceptions have to be remembered again.

Record the exceptions as rules and they survive every reassignment. Keep two people apart, keep a family together, pin a person to a seat, put a student in the front row. Reassign as often as you like and the exceptions hold.

Building a chart is a laptop job. Dragging thirty desks on a phone screen is not a good time, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise.

Looking one up is a phone job, and that is what the shared link is for. Guests and colleagues open it, type their name, and see where they are sitting, without downloading anything or creating an account of their own.

A hundred guests on round tables, fifty on rectangular tables, twenty-four desks in pairs, thirty desks in rows, a classroom U shape, and a band and orchestra layout. Open one, change what does not match your room, and paste your list over the placeholder names.