I was working with a developer the other day and he was typing out each table name and all the column names he needed when working in Management Studio. He didn’t know that you can drag a table or column from object explorer into the query window and thinking about it, I didn’t know for ages when I first started with SQL.

It seems obvious but if you haven’t seen it before then how would you know that you could do that? Maybe you’d work it out but I thought I’d write this quick post to show anyone out there who wasn’t aware of this. What’s also really cool is that you can drag the columns folder from object explorer into the query window and it’ll drop all the columns from the table. So much better than typing out all the column names (even with intellisense) or using SELECT *