SSMS Tips and Tricks 8-2: Resetting the window layout

One of the problems with applications that have highly-configurable user interfaces (UI) is that users can end up configuring them in ways they hadn’t intended, and then don’t know how to get back to where they were.

I remember the first time that I was at a session with a presenter from Microsoft showing the (at the time) new personalization options in ASP.NET. You could build a website and let the user determine how the site should be laid out, to suit themselves.

Overall, I can’t say that I really like working with websites like that but I can understand the potential appeal. I can also easily see how end users could get really messed up.

I remember asking the presenter if there was a simple button that put the site back the way it was initially developed and removed the user’s modifications, so that a user could always just get back to square one.

He told me “ah no, there isn’t an option like that”.

I’m glad that the SSMS team don’t think that way. While SSMS is very configurable, I have seen people get really messed up with the window management in it. They ended up dragging a window when they meant to drag something else, or did another action that changed their UI and it stuck. Then they don’t know how to “fix” it.

In SSMS, there’s a wonderful option in the Window menu, that does just what’s needed:

Reset Window Layout is the “get me back to where I was” menu item.

2025-10-04