The Object Explorer Details windows (from the View menu, or the keyboard shortcut F7) displays detail information about the objects that are in the selected node in the Object Explorer window. While the Object Explorer Details window does give you some useful information, it can be made better! This is done by adding additional columns to the Details windows.

By default, the details windows shows you the name, schema, create date and policy health state. However, if you were to right-click on the column headings, you can add additional columns to that view, making it even more useful. The columns that are available for you to choose from are those columns that are applicable for that node. For instance, the table node of a database allows you to select the following columns:

While the Stored Procedure node allows you to select these columns:

Once you have added the column to the view, you can sort on that column (by clicking the column heading)

In the Object Explorer window, you can only select and work on one item at a time. The Object Explorer Details window allows you to select and work with multiple items. If you want to drop all the users from a database, select them all from here and hit delete.

This post is for day twenty-two of my month-long blog series “A Month of SSMS Tips”. I have a landing page for the series at bit.ly/MonthOfSSMS. Please visit this page for an easy place to quickly view all of the other tips in this series.

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