How do I put chairs on one side of a table?

Select the table and use the per-side chair control in the right-hand panel. One side seats a head table; each of the four sides also has its own stepper, so a table against a wall or a 3+3+1+1 eight-top is a couple of clicks.

Select the table. Under Chairs in the right-hand panel there is a small plan of the table with a minus and a plus on each of its four sides, and a row of buttons beneath it. One side is the head-table answer.

Set two chairs on a 6′ banquet and they land opposite each other, one on each long side — not on the ends. That is the automatic arrangement doing what it should for a banquet. One side is what moves them together.

The four presets

1Both sides — the banquet default. Chairs split evenly down the two long sides.
2One side — a head table, or a table pushed against a wall. Everyone faces the room.
3Ends only — the conference-table setup, two people facing each other across the length.
4All around — seats the short ends as well as the sides. This is the real eight-top: three, three, and one at each end.

When none of them is quite it

Each side has its own stepper, so you are not limited to the presets. Four along the front and one on the end, or five down one side and nothing anywhere else — set it directly and the chairs go where you put them. The seat count keeps up as you go, so the number the room is counted as seating is always the number you have actually set.

Reset to auto hands the table back to the automatic arrangement whenever you want to start over.

Which way is “one side”?

The sides belong to the table, not the screen — so on a table you have rotated, the top stepper adds a chair to what the table considers its top. If the chairs end up facing the wrong way, rotate the table rather than hunting for a different side: rotation and seating are separate controls and they compose.

Round tables

Round tables do not have sides, so they work differently: a single count spread evenly around the circle, plus a crescent option that seats one half only, so every guest faces the front. That is the one to use for a room watching a stage.

It travels with the table

Seating is stored on the table itself, so duplicating it carries the arrangement, and it renders the same in the 2D plan, the 3D walkthrough, a share link and an exported PDF. Set it once and it is set everywhere the plan appears.