Shortcut Key in SQL Server Management Studio

Shortcut Key in Sql Server Management Studio

Launching SSMS

START -> Run or press Windows + R, type ssms and click OK (or hit ENTER) which will launch SSMS.
You can also specify different parameters or switches

• The -E switch will let you connect to the local instance using Windows authentication.
• The -U switch is used to specify a user and -P to specify the password
• If you want SSMS to connect to a specific database you can use the -d switch
• If you want a script file to be opened in SSMS you can specify the location and name of the file. This will just open the file in SSMS and will not execute the code. If you need to execute a script file you can use the SQLCMD utility.
• To close SSMS you can use ALT+F4.

You can simply open the SSMS or you can specify the -E switch to open SSMS and connect using Windows authentication. If the current user does not have sufficient permissions obviously it will fail.

When we open SSMS a splash screen appears while loading SSMS in the memory. You can specify -nosplash switch which opens SSMS without the splash screen.

You can use -? which gives you the different command options as shown below. 

Table Details

            If you select a table name in the query window of Sql Server Management Studio
and press ALT + F1 it will display the details of that table.

In the background shortcut key will execute sp_help on your behalf, so in this example it executes: sp_help users, which is much quicker than typing it.

Otherwise you can also use sp_columns test_tbl

Changing Databases

Once you are in a Query Window in SSMS you can use CTRL+U to change the database. When you press this combination, the database combo-box will be selected as shown below. You can then use the UP and DOWN arrow keys to change between databases (or type a character to jump to databases starting with that character) select your database and hit ENTER to return back to the Query Window.

Changing Code Case (Upper or Lower)

When you are writing code you may not bother with using upper or lower case to make your code easier to read. To fix this later, you can select the specific text and hit CTRL+SHIFT+U to make it upper case or use CTRL+SHIFT+L to make it lower case as shown below.

Commenting Out Code

When writing code sometimes you need to comment out lines of code. You can select specific lines and hit CTRL+K followed by CTRL+C to comment it out and CTRL+K followed by CTRL+U to uncomment it out as shown below.

 Indenting Code

As a coding best practice you should to indent your code for better readability. To increase the indent, select the lines of code (to be indented) and hit TAB as many times as you want to increase the indent likewise to decrease the indent again select those lines of code and hit SHIFT+TAB.

There are many shortcut keys that are listed below.

Action	SSMS-Shortcut Key
Display the Query Designer	CTRL+SHIFT+Q
Close a menu or dialog box, canceling the action	ESC
Cancel a query	ALT+BREAK
Connect	CTRL+O
Disconnect	CTRL+F4
Disconnect and close child window	ALT+F4
Database object information	ALT+F1
Go to a line number	CTRL+G
Remove comments	CTRL+SHIFT+R
Execute a query	F5 or Ctrl + E
New Query window	CTRL+N
Object Browser (show/hide)	F8
Parse the query and check syntax	CTRL+F5
Display results in grid format	CTRL+D
Display results in text format	CTRL+T
Use database	CTRL+U

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