Back before I started this site, I had the tedious task of coming up with the table plan for our wedding. We thought long and hard about just letting it be a free for all, but for reasons I cannot remember we both decided that assigned seating was best.
It sounds like a really simple thing to do, but I wanted to do this on my computer so that I could quickly change and tweak everything, and then print it all out for the staff at our venue. That’s when I hit a wall — I couldn’t figure out how best to do it. (I started with an Illustrator document, that proved to be a bad idea rather quickly.)
[I ended up buying Perfect TablePlan][1]. It is *not* great looking — and that’s being generous. I haven’t looked in ages for this kind of software (nor do I need it now), but they sent me an email about their latest version, so I thought I would throw it out there for all of you.
The best feature — the feature that sold me — was the ability of the software to not only say “these two people should sit together”, but to say “these people should *not* sit together”. Then you can have the software auto assign the seats and from there fine-tune. It helped me tremendously.
[1]: http://www.perfecttableplan.com/