SSMS Tips and Tricks 2-4: Presentation mode

I spend a lot of time delivering presentations of various types. Many of those presentations involve showing code in either SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) or Visual Studio (VS).

I’ve become quite fast at taking a default setup of SSMS and changing it to the fonts, etc. that I want to use for a presentation. Given how large these fonts are, I don’t want to use them for day-to-day work.

The best solution that I’ve found for this is to create another user (let’s call it DemoUser) on my laptop, and then configuring fonts, etc. for presentations for that user, quite separate to my normal work fonts.

In recent builds of SSMS, the team realized the importance of this and added a Presentation mode.

You can find it as part of the Feature Search option:

When you open that, you get the Search screen that has both Code and Feature searches available, and it will have preselected Feature Search. I then entered the word Presenter.

After selecting the option to Edit Presenter Mode Settings, I see:

You’ll note that an XML file appears. It would be helpful if this was a GUI instead of an XML file because you’ll need to know what the names of the other settings are, if you want to change them.

For now, let’s just change the TextEditorFontSize and the EnvironmentFontSize using the perfectly-fine XML editor in SSMS. The first entry changes the size of the text when you’re editing queries. The second one affects the size of text in Object Explorer, menus, etc.

If I click File, then Save As, note where this is saved:

It’s under your AppData folder. Once this is saved though, we can test it. In the same Feature Seach screen, just double-click the option to toggle the presenter mode, and you should see the change. Do it again to set it back.

If you change output grid or text sizes, you’ll still need to restart SSMS to see the outcome. The only difference is that you won’t get the warning that you normally do.

The option to toggle is great. Previously there was only an option to set it back to the default values, which wasn’t helpful.

2025-06-08