In the same vein as Steve Jones’ series on Customizing SSMS this is a fairly basic trick, but one that not everyone appears to know.

A fairly standard layout of SSMS looks like this.

If you drill down, to say the table list, you can left-click and drag a table name from the object explorer to the query window. For long object names this can be a real life saver!

This trick will work with almost every object name in object explorer. One notable exception is the instance name. I have no idea why and I could wish that Microsoft would eliminate this exception in the future as it would have come in very handy on more than one occasion. In the mean time the ability to drag and drop the name of a Table, Column, Constraint, Index, Stored Procedure, Function, Login, or even a Job (to name just a few objects) has come in very handy time and time again.

Filed under: Microsoft SQL Server, SQLServerPedia Syndication, SSMS Tagged: microsoft sql server, SSMS, Steve Jones