Downloading the list, filtered as you left it

The download button above your guest list gives you a CSV of the list exactly as you have filtered it. Not the whole list. The filtered one. That is deliberate: your caterer needs heads for one day, your venue needs names, and neither of them needs two hundred phone numbers to do their job. Filter first, export second.

Why it downloads what is on the screen

Whatever you have narrowed the list to is what lands in the file. Invitation, ceremony, reply state, group, side, whether you have sent the invitation and whether the guest has opened it - set those filters, then download, and the file holds those rows and nothing else. If you have filtered to the people attending the reception, the file is the people attending the reception.

One of those filters has to be switched on first. Filtering to a single ceremony only appears once you have turned on per-ceremony replies in the editor; that setting is off unless you choose it, and until you do, every filter here works at the level of the whole invitation. With it on, the heads column shows that ceremony’s seats rather than the guest’s whole party, so a family of four who hold one seat at the family lunch appear as one, and the file is named after the ceremony you chose, which means the thing in your downloads folder says what it is without you opening it. If a filter leaves you with no rows at all, there is nothing to download and no button to press.

The caterer wants a number, not a directory

A kitchen cannot do anything with a list of names. They need heads, for a date, by the day their contract names. So filter to that ceremony, filter to the people who have accepted, and download that. Then open the file and delete the columns nobody in a kitchen will read: the WhatsApp number, the side of the family, whether the invitation was sent. What is left is a short sheet of names, heads and confirmed attending. There is no total row in the file, so read the head count for the filter you have set off the top of the guest list screen before you download.

Dietary numbers do not come from this file. The afternoon the kitchen rings to ask how many vegetarian mains it is preparing is a poor moment to find that out, so find it out now: counts per dietary option are shown on the questions screen, in guests and in heads, and allergies stay as written words with a name beside them. Send those separately. Put the number itself in the body of your message and attach the sheet behind it as the working. The number people act on is the one they can read without opening anything.

The venue is answering a different question

A venue wants to know who is expected and where they sit. Reply history, group tags and phone numbers tell them nothing they can use. If you have built a seating plan, the documents the venue wants come from there rather than from this export: a chart of the room, and a guest list grouped by table, both meant to be printed. Anyone standing at a door on the day needs paper in their hand, not a spreadsheet on a phone.

Send the venue the export only when they have asked for the raw list - usually because they are doing their own counting for staffing or bar stock. Ask which columns they want before you send anything.

One file per supplier, doing one job

This is less about privacy in the abstract and more about the fact that a short file gets used correctly. Hand somebody eight columns and two hundred rows and they will ask you a question you already answered. Filter to what each person is actually deciding:

• The caterer: one ceremony, accepted only, heads and confirmed attending. No phone numbers.
• The venue: names and tables, from the seating plan rather than from here.
• Transport or a hotel block: filter by the group it applies to, and send that group alone.
• Whoever is chasing replies: the people who have not answered, with their numbers. This is the one file where the WhatsApp column earns its place, and it stays inside the family.

Yesterday’s spreadsheet in someone’s inbox

The worst catering mistakes are rarely a wrong count. They are a right count in a file nobody opened, while somebody works from the attachment above it. Replies keep landing on your list after you export, so a file is a photograph of a moment, and it starts going out of date the second it saves.

• Put the date in the filename. Never the word “final”, which is how you end up with two files both claiming to be it.
• Download on the day you are sending it, not the week before. A file exported early and sent late is the one that causes trouble.
• When you replace a file, say in one line what changed and which file it supersedes. A silent replacement gets filed under the old one.
• One person sends numbers to each supplier. If your mother gives the caterer a count and you give them another, the kitchen cooks to whichever arrived last.
• Keep a copy of exactly what you sent. It is your record of what was agreed, and it settles the invoice argument later.

When a spreadsheet is not the answer

Sometimes it is not. Thirty covers you can recite from memory do not need a file at all - ring the kitchen and read the numbers down the phone, because the attachment saves nobody anything. If a supplier has their own form or portal, fill in theirs rather than insisting on yours; you will not win that one and it wastes a week. And if what you need is a document for a room - a door list, a chart on an easel - print it rather than exporting it.

One limit worth knowing before you plan around this. Export takes your guest list out; nothing comes back the other way. There is no spreadsheet import at the moment, so a list edited in Excel and edited in your dashboard will quietly diverge, and nobody wins. Make the changes in one place, and let the file be the copy you send out.

Related: Guest list manager