As far as I was aware, it wasn't that this was a secret, it was just so obvious that noone bothered to mention it before.
And certainly not with so many '!!!!!!!!!'s
How about this instead.
Open Enterprise Manager. Navigate to a table. Highlight it.
Hit Ctrl+C.
Goto Query Analyzer.
Hit Ctrl+V
Hi Graham,
It could be that I'm really tired (and I am), but step 3 of Method 1 says:
Click "Results in Text"
So we're no longer in "Grid" mode. The article therefore doesn't tell us how to get the header-row of the grid results into Excel. I'd like to do that.
You ask "What does this mean? Are you saying that you knew innately that you had to set Results output format as Tab Delimited?". Well, yes. I use Excel a little bit, and SQL Server a lot. I've been putting results into Excel this way for years. You are correct that it's not entirely natural as it was learned behaviour, but it's as natural to me as eating pizza.
Regards
Lance
Man..! I normally read all articles that are posted here at SQLServerCentral, some very good ones and some not that good. But ok, all topics can't interest everyone.
But when I got the mail and read the headlline "Best Kept Secret.." I was really suprised. Wow, was there something to know about a tool that I've used for sooo many years?
I hope that this article has been to use for someone. I self just got suprised that this made it to the "article of the day".
Hi Lance
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As long as step 8 is followed (Click "Print column headers(*)") which I think is the default anyway then the header row will be there. Try it and see!
Cheers - Graham
I've been using "Data > Text to Columns" for years...
Such a simple little thing, but it will save some time.
Mark Hickin: I like the EM/QA copy & paste trick; haven't seen that before. Not that I'd use it much but handy to know nonetheless.
Just something to add actually: a possible pitfall (when using Method 1 at least). I have a table with a key that is a CHAR(18) and its data are something like this:
200402280000000884
Could also be a BIGINT of course. When copied and pasted to Excel using tab-delimited output, because Excel can't handle such a large number, this gets changed to:
200402280000000000
(Even though it's a CHAR data type, because Excel is using "General" formatting, it assumes it to be numeric.)
It's easy to miss this at first. The only way I've found to get around it so far is to use the Column Aligned option, then when doing "Data > Text to Columns", on the screen where you set up data types, you can change it from General to Text and the full number will be preserved.
I enjoyed the explanation, it was simple to follow. I hope the bunch of "experts" here would come up with something on their own instead of being so critical.
Nice Job.
