Why this instead of a spreadsheet
Nearly everyone starts a seating chart in a spreadsheet, and nearly everyone abandons it somewhere around the third revision. The reason is not that spreadsheets are hard. It is that the actual difficulty of a seating chart is not arithmetic — it is the handful of people who must not end up at the same table. A spreadsheet cannot know that, so every rearrangement means manually rechecking the same awkward pairs.
That is the specific problem this tool is built around. You tell it which pairs must stay apart, and the automatic arrangement treats those as hard rules while keeping any unresolved conflict visible. If you place people together by hand, the table is flagged immediately. Everything else — the drag and drop, the capacity counter and the printable output — supports that one idea.
How your data is handled
The planner is local by default. Guest lists, class lists, table layouts, manual assignments and any saved rules stay in your browser until you deliberately activate an Event Pass for that event. This is a deliberate choice because guest lists and student names can be sensitive.
An optional Event Pass creates an account and uploads one chosen event to provide cross-device saving and sharing. Without a pass, a chart made on your laptop will not automatically appear on your phone. Download a private JSON backup to move or preserve a local chart, and save a PDF when you need a printable version.
What it costs
The manual planner is free to use, with no guest or table limits, no watermark on printed charts and no trial period. It does not carry advertising. A $9.90 Event Pass for one event unlocks unlimited together/apart rules, cloud saving, cross-device editing and collaboration.