Wedding guest list template

Build the list in households, not in people. One row is one invitation — the couple in flat three, a family of five, a friend who is bringing someone. Listing individuals first is how a guest list quietly collects duplicates: the same cousin typed once under your side and once under your partner’s. The household column is the invitation; the guest names column holds everyone that envelope or link covers, and it is the line the stationer and the seating plan both read later.

Adults and children sit in their own columns because everyone downstream prices them apart — caterers quote a child rate, venues count capacity differently, and the counters above the table add them up as you type. The side column exists for the conversation nobody enjoys: when the list is thirty people too long, splitting it by who invited whom is the only fair way to cut it. Address is for the posted card, email or phone for the message that actually gets opened; most couples end up using both, for different halves of the family.

Keep invitation sent and RSVP as two separate columns. Collapsing them into one is the commonest mistake in a homemade spreadsheet, and it hides exactly the guests you need to find: the people you have not yet written to look identical to the people who have not yet answered. Here one column moves from not sent to sent, and the other from awaiting to yes, no or maybe. The gap between the two is your chasing list.

Meal and notes are free text on purpose. Meals get written as “2 fish, 1 vegetarian” far more often than as a single choice, and notes are where the useful, unclassifiable things live — a wheelchair, a nut allergy, a guest who needs a lift from the station, a name that is spelled two ways in your family. Trying to make either of those a dropdown is how people stop filling the column in.

The download is a plain CSV built in your browser: UTF-8, comma-separated, headers on the first row, one row for each household you typed into and nothing else — no totals row, so you can sort and filter it the moment it opens. Nothing you type is uploaded and nothing is stored, which also means the table is gone when the tab closes. Download it first, then keep the spreadsheet as your working copy.

A spreadsheet is a good place to build a list and a poor place to collect answers. Replies arrive by text, on WhatsApp, through a parent, in a voice note — and every one of them has to be typed in by hand, twice if two of you are keeping copies. The list is worth building by hand; the replies are worth letting the invitation collect for you.