Did you know that items in the Object Explorer can be dragged and dropped into a query window? This can be a real time saver!

Drag the database name to have it put into the query window. Grab the table name and drag it to the FROM clause. Drag the entire Columns node of a table to get a comma-delimited list of all columns.

When you drag the items to where you want them to go in your query, the textual equivalent of them will be put into the query window. In this example, the table name and schema names (both bracketized) were added by dragging the table name to the query window. A column-delimited list of the columns was created by dragging the entire columns node to the query window.

This post is for day fourteen of my month-long blog series “A Month of SSMS Tips”. I have a landing page for the series at bit.ly/MonthOfSSMS. Please visit this page for an easy place to quickly view all of the other tips in this series.