Seating place cards are used to assign seats at an important function. As the host of the event, you know with whom your guests are most familiar and you know which individuals, couples, and families will have more fun if they are seated together. This is your opportunity to be creative with both your seating arrangement and your place cards.

For a large event, place cards are printed with both a name and a table number and are arranged alphabetically on a table positioned at the entrance of the reception area. Guests browse the cards and find their names, taking the cards with them to their assigned tables. Upon arriving at their tables, they can choose any seat.

In this article, you’ll learn how to print individual seating place cards using a home computer and an inkjet printer. If you’d rather print 4-Up seating place cards that come four to an 8 ½ x 11 sheet, jump to our Learn How Easy it is to Print LCI’s 4-Up Computer Place Cards video.

Our individual place cards come in 50 packs. They are flat for printing and scored for easy folding. There are dozens of individual seating place cards to choose from-those with designs, borders, metallic finishes, and deckled edges-but we’ll keep it simple with our Ecru Place Card. It’s a creamy Ecru color with a smooth finish that matches all of LCI Paper’s Ecru items including invitations and envelopes.

The first step in printing place cards is to download the free Classic, Linen & Metallic Place Cards 4 1/2 x 2 1/2 printing template provided on our web site. You can open the template file in Microsoft Word or with another word processor that reads the DOC format. This includes both OpenOffice.org Writer and AbiWord. The template, with a width of 4.5″ and a height of 5″, is formatted to the dimensions of the place card. This takes into account the card is flat; it has not been folded to its finished size of 4.5″ x 2.5″. Margins are set to .5″ all around except for the top margin which is 3.25″. The reason for the larger top margin is because we will not be printing on the top half of the card. You’ll have a better idea once you see the printed place card.

Go ahead and change the sample place card wording so that it’s relevant to your event. Type the name and table number for one of your guests. Change the font face and size. Perhaps you’ll choose text to match that of your invitation. Since we’re printing on Ecru card stock, we’ve chosen to print brown text.

We’ve set up our template and we’re almost ready to print. We suggest cutting a plain piece of paper down to the dimensions of the place card and use it as a printing test. Load the test sheet into the printer and adjust the printer’s plastic guide to rest flush against the paper.

Before printing, we need to access our printer’s driver and communicate the size of our place card. Otherwise, the printer assumes we are printing on a standard 8 ½ x 11 sheet instead of a place card. Go to File/Print and choose your printer. Click the Properties button to access the printer driver.

Find the area for paper size and enter a custom value using the dimensions of our unfolded place card-4.5″ wide by 5″ high. Accept the changes and hit OK. You’ll find yourself back at the print dialog box. Hit OK once more and print your test sheet. Only the bottom half of the test sheet will be printed. Fold the sheet in half as you would fold a place card. The front panel printing should be vertically and horizontally aligned.

Once you’ve settled on the look of your place card, you should save the template to your Documents folder. At your convenience, you can go back to your customized template and finish typing the rest of your names and table numbers.

You can load your place cards into your printer and print the cards one by one, changing the template wording to show a different name and table number for every card, or you can set up a mail merge. A mail merge requires some extra setup time so we’ll leave that lesson for another article.

Congratulations! You’ve learned how to print professional looking table place cards using LCI Paper’s Word template and your inkjet printer.

Joshua Birch