If you have a database with hundreds (or thousands) of objects, finding the one that you are looking for in the Object Explorer can be a pain. Thankfully, SSMS allows you to apply filtering criteria to this. Just right-click on the node that you want to filter, select Filter, and then Filter Settings to set the filter that you want to use:

Once you have set the filtering criteria and clicked the OK button, that node will only show the items that match the criteria. You can even set this to a value that won’t match any objects – so you can prank others and make them think that all the tables have been removed from your production database.

This post is for day twenty 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.