Wayne Sheffield continues his SSMS shortcuts series. He starts off with a powerful way of selecting vertical columns of text. Then he shows how to make text all lowercase or uppercase.
From there, he gets to one of my favorite features which I commonly forget exists:
We’re all used to using the clipboard in Windows programs. You copy something into it with Ctrl+C, and paste it into your document with Ctrl+V. However, did you know that the SSMS clipboard remembers the last 20 items that were put into the clipboard, and that you can cycle through all of these clipboard values? The keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+V will paste the most recent item added to the clipboard. Using this shortcut repeatedly will cycle through the “Clipboard Ring”, pasting that item into the document. Now you don’t have to go back and copy items again!
Next, he shows how you can drag and drop to get all columns into a query window quickly. Finally, Wayne shows you how to create shortcuts for important queries. In my case, various forms of sp_whoisactive dominate this: Ctrl+F1 for my desired layout, Ctrl-3 for my queries (three for me), Ctrl-4 for my desired layout plus execution plans (four for more).