Seating chart maker

The obvious approach — fill each table to capacity, then start the next — is the wrong one, and it is what a spreadsheet does if you let it. Fifty guests at tables of eight gives six full tables and one with two people at it, which looks like an afterthought and feels like one to whoever is sitting there. Spreading evenly gives seven tables of seven and one of one fewer, and nobody notices anything.

The rule used here is that no two tables differ by more than one person. That is the best possible balance for any guest count and table count, and it falls out of dividing and distributing the remainder one table at a time rather than filling greedily.

What this deliberately does not do is decide who sits with whom. Seating people together — or apart — is the entire difficulty of a real seating plan and it depends on things no tool knows: who is family, who is divorced, who talks too much. What it gives you is the arithmetic done and a printed sheet to write on, which is where most of the tedium actually is.

For place cards, the plan prints table by table with each seat numbered, so it can be read out or handed to whoever is setting up.