This is a cool SSMS trick I picked up a while back
Though not nearly as far back as I wish I had. It’s so cool I made a .gif of it in action. When you’re done putting your socks back on, I’ll tell you how it works.
This .gif was brought to you by the Cool SSMS Tricks Foundation, in association with Worldwide .gifs
Pure ALT+SHIFT magic.
Hold down both keys at the same time, and use your up and down arrow keys to navigate vertically. There will be a thin grey line showing you exactly which rows you’ve grabbed. Then Just type normally. I uh, simulated a typing error, to illustrate that you can also delete text doing this. Yeah.
It really makes doing simple multi-line edits a breeze, especially if you don’t feel like setting up Excel formulas to do similar tasks. These are random Massachusetts zip codes, which is why they get a leading zero, and quotes.
Can you feel the efficiency?!
Kendra says: What in the…. holy cow, that actually works!
Brent says: I knew about that trick, but ZOMG PEOPLE THERE IS A PRODUCTIVITY GIF IN OUR BLOG