Reading Your Seating Chart at a Glance
Every colour, ring and dot on a Seat the Day chart, and the question each one answers before you ask it.
A seating chart holds a lot of small, awkward facts. Who can't eat the fish. Who asked not to sit near the speakers. Whether table nine has quietly become all one family. On paper those facts live somewhere else — a second document, a spreadsheet column you have to scroll to, a text message from three months ago.
Seat the Day puts them on the chart itself. Here's what each marker means.
One seat, three facts. Gold for her side of the wedding, a red ring for a dietary restriction, an amber dot because she left a note.
Colours Come From Your Sheet
Most seating tools assume two sides and name them for you. Seat the Day reads whatever you typed in the Side column and colours the chart from that. If your sheet says Beth and Steve, the chart says Beth and Steve — useful for second weddings, blended families, and anyone whose guest list doesn't split neatly down the middle.
A colour per side
Assigned in the order the sides first appear in your sheet. Rename a side there and the chart follows on the next sync.
Grey means unassigned
The Side cell is empty. Nothing's broken — it's a guest nobody has placed on a side yet.
What a Guest Is Carrying
These are the details you'd otherwise keep in your head — and the ones easiest to forget at exactly the wrong moment, halfway through dragging someone to a new table.
Red ring — food allergy
Flagged from the allergy column in your sheet. It stays visible while you rearrange, and it carries through to the printed chart as a red note beside the name.
Amber dot — seating note
This guest asked for something. Open them to read it in full, or use the Seating notes panel to check every request at once.
Star — wedding party
Filled gold for yes, grey for no. Click it to change without leaving the chart.
Dashed circle — open seat
Empty and available. Click it to seat whoever you have selected.
What a Table Is Doing
Tables collapse when you want the whole room on one screen. They keep telling you things while collapsed.
Ratio bar — how the table splits
The balance of sides at that table, with the count written underneath. A table that's drifted to all one family shows it immediately.
On the floor plan
Table number, how full it is, and the same side split washed across the background. Drag tables into the shape of your actual room.
Gold glow — you just found them
Search a name and the chart jumps to their table, opens it if it was collapsed, and glows for a few seconds so you don't lose it again.
The Room Around the Tables
Where someone sits matters less than what they're sitting next to. Drop in the fixed points of the venue and the chart starts making sense as a room rather than a grid.
And One Dot for the Sheet
Seat the Day stays connected to your Google Sheet in both directions. No importing, no exporting, no version called final-FINAL-2. The connection status sits in the corner of the chart.
Green — connected
Changes here are saving to your sheet. Changes there come back to the chart.
Grey — no sheet yet
Your work is kept in this browser. Connect a sheet whenever you're ready.
Bringing It All Together
None of these markers require you to remember anything. That's the point. The chart surfaces the allergy, the request, the lopsided table and the empty seat as you work, so the questions get answered while you're still able to do something about them.
Try it on your own guest list
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