Wedding Assistant is your average, middle of the road wedding planner and although we found a few quirks with the program it is sure to help any bride plan and organize her dream wedding. However, we did have some difficulties learning how to use the budget section and the seating assignment section of the software.

One of the best features Wedding Assistant has going for it is the interface. Wedding Assistant’s entire interface is modeled after and designed similarly to Microsoft Office 2007. Since the interface is so familiar there is very little learning curve. Even your calendar and task lists look and operate just like Outlook.

When you make your guest list you can select which events they are invited to. Some guests may only be invited to the reception; whereas, other guests will be invited to multiple events. The events box includes common events where you can select who is invited and who is attending. However, I can’t seem to figure out how to add additional events.

Wedding Assistant also has a guest list wizard which is simply a dialog box that contains all of the information you would need to know about a specific guest like contact information, which events they are invited to, their accommodations and travel arrangements.

The event wizard helps you get your event list started by asking a few simple questions about your wedding arrangements like if the reception is for adults only or if your reception needs seating assignments. This allows the software to skip events or modify your wedding events.

In the event setup wizard you can also assign specific roles or titles to your guests like mother of the bride or best man.

We found that Wedding Assistant doesn’t have a lot of pre-loaded features. It feels like you have to do a lot of preparation work to make the software most efficient. It’s kind of a double-edge sword. Some programs come included with so much that you spend most of your time deleting, however Wedding Assistant is so bare bones that you need to fill in all of your events, gift categories and timelines yourself.

In addition to that we were a little surprised that Wedding Assistant doesn’t have a date countdown. Most wedding planning software will ask for your wedding date. Since this feature doesn’t exist in Wedding Assistant you have to manually fill in your tasks and timelines.

Wedding Assistant’s most comprehensive sections include guest management and vendor management. You can organize your guest’s names, which events they are invited to and if they’ve RSVPed.

Wedding Assistant includes a unique statics display feature. Here you can see the ratio of bride’s guests vs. groom’s guests and the relationship of those at each event.

In the gift section you can specify which event your gift was received at, but it is not in the initial dialogue box. You have to save what information you have and add the event at a different time. As a matter of fact, there are many instances in the software where most of the detailed information needed to be added in additional dialog boxes.

We felt that the money management section is where Wedding Assistant probably needs the most work. Although you can add any number of transactions and accounts we felt the organization to be a bit confusing. Everything is managed in dialog boxes and you have to fill in your total budget for large accounts first then organize your transactions. We couldn’t find a way to just look at items under a specific account.

You will get used to using the system the way it is set up, but there is a bit of a learning curve.

Although there is a seating section associated with Wedding Assistant I had to find it on one of the the quick start wizards. There wasn’t a navigation tab specifically for seating. Additionally, we had problems navigating out of the seating section. When we opened the seating arrangements screen we lost our red “x” to close out of the screen.

Overall, we really like that Wedding Assistant uses the familiar interface of Microsoft Office to help you organize your wedding; however, some of the front end work you need to do to use this software, the budget learning curve and the lack of a seating tab on the top navigation make this software just a little more difficult than our top choices.