SSMS Tips and Tricks 1-1: Dragging all column names from Object Explorer

This is a popular shortcut in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) but I continue to be amazed how many people aren’t aware of it.

Object Explorer is a very useful part of SSMS and you can drag pretty much any name that you see in it across to a query window.

You could do the same for each column in the Columns list.

You might also realize that you can hover over the asterisk and see a list of columns:

But the one that many people aren’t aware of is that you can drag the word Columns across and get all the columns:

The final thing that always seemed missing about this for me, was that I often wanted to do the same with the column list in a user defined table type.

I asked @sqltoolsguy and the SSMS team nicely, and only a few weeks later, that works too:

In earlier versions, the quoting of the names wasn’t consistent. Version 17.6 fixed that.

2025-05-07