This Woman's Fiancé Created an Excel Spreadsheet to Determine Who Makes the Wedding Guest List

Weddings are all about celebrating love and bringing friends and family together, but let’s not overlook the exorbitant costs that come with them. Between the food, décor, attire, venues, and everything else (seriously, the list is endless), you can easily find yourself in the hole by thousands when it’s all said and done. And the more people you invite, the more you spend.

To keep their wedding budget in check, one woman’s fiancé took a bold — and, let’s be honest, slightly clever — approach.

He created an Excel spreadsheet to grade potential guests using the classic school grading system (A, B, C, D, F). Only those who earned a good grade (more on that later) landed a coveted spot on the official guest list.

While this guy definitely gets an A for effort — because that is one heck of a spreadsheet — it’s a bit controversial. Here’s a breakdown of how it works.

TikToker Kate O'Neill (@kateeoneill) shared her fiancé’s very interesting — and slightly controversial — method for deciding who gets a wedding invite. Describing him as an "Excel nerd," Kate revealed in her now-viral video (with over 900,000 likes and 159,000 shares) how Michael created a scoring system to rank potential guests.

In the clip, Kate’s fiancé explains, "What we’re doing is, there are far too many people we want to invite to our wedding compared to who we can invite, just cause you’re so bloody popular. So, I devised a little scoring system for each." To avoid any conflict or offense, he opted to hide the names in the video. Gee, how kind!

While Kate hilariously pointed out that the Excel spreadsheet was "insane," her fiancé quickly jumped in to defend it, saying, "It’s not insane, it’s beautiful, absolutely beautiful."

So, here’s how he organized his Excel spreadsheet. It starts with the relationship (i.e., family, friend) and whether they have a plus-one — because, you know, family does (or at least should) come first. He also categorized them by extended family. Then, he listed who invited them: him or Kate.

Now here’s where the spreadsheet gets exciting. The next column is the "Necessity of Inviting," scored from 1-10, with 10 being a necessity. Michael explains, "Because we all know there are plenty of people at weddings that we have to invite, whether we want to invite them or not."

Up next is the "Likelihood of Coming" column, which refers to how likely they are to show up. Michael notes that if they’re not likely to attend, it can "drag their score down."

Perhaps the spiciest of all the columns are the two bearing Michael and Kate’s scores for each guest, where they rank them 1-10 on how much they want them to come. Yikes.

A quick scroll reveals that while they agreed on some guests, they had vastly different thoughts on others. Michael gave one person a 3, while Kate gave them a 6. Another guest got a 10 from Michael, but Kate only scored them a 7. As usual, Excel fashion took over, and the numbers were crunched to calculate the "Overall Score," which Michael says is out of 40.

This score is then used to determine what goes in the last column: the final grade. "A’s and B’s, you’re coming. C’s, we don’t know yet, based on numbers and how much this bloody thing is gonna cost." As for F’s, "You’re not coming to our wedding."

Needless to say, if you know these folks and assumed you'd be invited to their wedding but don’t receive an invitation, you probably landed a D or F score — sorry! On the bright side, though, he did mention that C’s might also be left off the list, so maybe it was a family member who pushed you out of your slot.