The Organized Wedding Consultant Online Help: Working with Seating
Views discussed: Diagram, Place Cards, Table Cards
The place to start with seating is "Diagram", under "Seating" in
the left-hand menu. The general idea of this view is to use the button
in the top-right corner (labeled "Add a Table, Bench/Pew, or Row
of Chairs") to create seating for an event, then to drag guests
from the list on the left to the chairs you want them to have. Use the
box at the top of the window to select which event you're working with
at the moment.
The rest of the ideas related to this view are best addressed in question-and-answer
format.
Q: Why is the list of guests empty? Or, it has guests in it, but not
as many as I know I've invited. Where are they?
A: In order for guests to appear in the left-hand list, you need to invite
them to the event for which you're arranging seating. There's a detailed
description of how to invite guests to an event in the separate help
article "Working with the Address Book", but the main thing
to understand is that adding people to the address book doesn't invite
them to a particular event. If you know you've invited guests, but they
still aren't showing up in the list, then the place to look is the checkboxes
under "Show which unseated guests" on the right-hand side of
the screen. These checkboxes control which guests appear in the list
on the left based on the how likely the "Responses" section
says they are to attend the event. This feature exists because most planners
don't want to spend time figuring out where to seat guests who are unlikely
to attend anyway. But if you uncheck too many of the boxes on the right,
you're not going to see all of the guests you want to seat!
Q: I'm trying to rearrange the tables with the mouse, and the tables
aren't moving. Why?
A: The seating diagram is not a floor plan designer. It's intended to
help you plan where guests should be seated at each table, on a table-by-table
basis, not to help you decide where the tables should be relative to
one another. That's because the thorniest problems of etiquette for seating
have to do with where people should be seated relative to one another
at the same table, not where they should be relative to other tables.
So this view helps you with the difficult part of the arrangements, but
leaves the question of where the tables should be placed in the room
to you. As such, it's more accurate to think of this view as a "list
of table diagrams" not a "diagram of the room." (We're
planning a floor plan designer for a later update of the software, but
we wanted to release the most important features first.)
Q: I'd like to have a long table running from side-to-side on the screen,
like I saw in the example seating for "Bennet-Darcy", but I
can't seem to manage it. How is it done?
A: As far as the software is concerned, the "ends" of a table
are always at the top and bottom of the screen, and the "sides" are
always at the left and right. So, if you want a table to run from side
to side, tell the program that there is one chair on each "side" of
the table, and 15 chairs (or however many) on each "end". Then
the table will run from side to side on the screen.
Q: I only want chairs on one side of my head table. How do I get rid
of the extra chairs?
A: In the lower-left corner of the view you'll see a list of symbols
for different kinds of seating (if you don't, you need to check the box
that says "Show draggable symbols"). One of these symbols is
an "X" labeled "No chair/No place for a guest". Use
the mouse to drag this "X" to any chair you want to eliminate,
and an "X" will replace the chair. If you change your mind
later, you can drag the symbol for a regular chair (or any of the other
symbols) back to that position.
Q: What's the point of the different colored lines connecting the guests?
A: If you're going to use formal seating etiquette, there are rules for
how guests should be seated relative to one another based on both their
genders and their relationships. If you're going to plan this sort
of formal seating, the lines make it much, much faster to organize
your guests according to the "rules". If you'd like to find
out more about the different systems by which this kind of seating
is done, click "Set Options for Seating" in the lower right
of the view.
Q: I tried dragging whole families at once to the tables and then dropping
them, thinking the program would automatically seat them according to
the rules of etiquette -- but I happen to know the rules, and the way
the program seated them is a mess. What went wrong?
A: Well, you're right on both counts. The program tries very hard to
seat people according to the rules of etiquette if you drop them on a
table without picking a particular seat, but the program isn't yet smart
enough to rearrange the other people at the table to come up with the
best possible arrangement -- it just shoehorns in the new guests as best
it can and comes as close to following the rules as it can manage. The
software gets it right for some sequences of guests, but for other sequences
it can't. (To see picture-perfect seating etiquette, try dropping married
couples with no children on an empty table of whatever size and shape
until the table is full. The patterns vary in interesting ways for different
sizes of tables.)
Q: I'm working on seating for the wedding -- not the reception, but
the first few reserved benches for the ceremony itself. I've tried dropping
guests on particular seats in the benches/pews, but the order of names
within each pew seems almost random. How do I control where guests sit
on the bench or pew?
A: You don't. If you're working with benches/pews (or rows of chairs),
you assign guests to a particular pew, not to a particular seat on the
pew. This limitation reflects the reality of how "pew cards" work.
Q: I'm trying to print place cards (or table cards), but I can't figure
out how to get them laid out properly: the perforated place cards I bought
have margins around the edge, and I can't find a way to account for the
margins in "Page Setup for Place Cards". How do I fix this
problem?
A: Tear the perforated margin off the top and left sides of your cards.
Then everything will work fine. (Okay, so it isn't the most elegant way
for the software to function -- but it works.)
