Bride's Guide: Q&A for the Big Day

Deciding who sits where, and with whom, at your wedding reception.

ByABC News via logo
April 15, 2010, 10:27 AM

April 20, 2010— -- Last night my fiance and I sat down to start figuring out the seating chart for our wedding reception.

We've heard from most of the initial nonresponders to the invitations, and wedding planner Mindy Weiss says it's a good idea to get the table arrangements out of the way ahead of time.

There are different philosophies about seating at a wedding reception, and Weiss says it's the one thing that's "very personal." Even if you have a planner helping you with the other last-minute details, you have to make the table assignments yourself.

At past weddings, I've been seated at the family table, the singles table, the head table and more. And I've always had the most fun at weddings when I was seated with people I knew well.

My fiance and I shared that philosophy when it came to our own seating chart, but we had different ideas about how to execute it. My approach was to simply make lists (as discussed in a previous entry, I love lists). My fiance preferred to lay everything out on a floor plan. "I need to see it," he says.

According to Mindy Weiss, there's no right or wrong way, but she believes "the good old-fashioned way for seating" is to lay everything out visually.

"It is good to write the guests' names on individual index cards and then start grouping the groups of people together," she says.

In her "Wedding Book," Weiss also suggests writing down names on Post-it notes and using paper plates to represent the tables.

The more modern approach, she says, is to "use an Excel spreadsheet to group tables."

When talking to your reception venue about table sizes, Weiss provided the following guidelines (if you're using round tables):

CLICK HERE for Day 24, little things that make a big difference on your big day.

CLICK HERE for Day 24, little things that make a big difference on your big day.

CLICK HERE to visit Mindy's Web site.