SSMS Tips and Tricks 2-10: Toggle full screen

SSMS is a great tool and it has lots of helpful menu items and toolbar items. Unfortunately, all these items take up screen real estate.

Even though you can get more screen real estate for editing, by unpinning the windows on each side, you can see that the default screen layout could be considered a bit cluttered if you really just want to focus on the particular query that you’re working on.

A keyboard shortcut can help here. Alt-Shift-Enter toggles full screen mode in SSMS. Note how it gives you much more screen real estate to work with:

And the same shortcut toggles it back.

2025-06-20