If you use Management Studio nearly as much as I do, you are probably interested in any little tidbit you can find that will make your use of the tool more tolerable. I thought I would share a few of the things I do when setting up a new environment where the tool will be used.
Fonts
Fellow twitterer Jeremiah Peschka turned me on to Consolas many moons ago, very adamant that it would be a much better experience than Courier New (the default fixed width font in SSMS). The proof is in the pudding:
Which one would you rather type/read/use? Not only is the font much crisper and easier to read, it also allows me to fit slightly more code horizontally into the same screen real estate. And it still behaves like a fixed width font, so if you are anything like me and obsess about lining up code blocks, you don’t have to worry about the mess that Arial or Verdana can make of your code.
I now install Consolas on all machines that already (or someday might) have Management Studio installed. And I have long been using it as my plain text / monospace font in other applications where I read or type a lot, such as Outlook and Entourage. To set it up in Management Studio, go to Tools | Options, Environment, Fonts and Colors, and set the “Show settings for:” box to “Text Editor.” Scroll through the “Font” dropdown and select Consolas, then hit OK. I also set the Results to Grid and Results to Text fonts to Consolas.
Note that if you have just installed Consolas, you may need to quit Management Studio and launch it again, in order for the dropdown to be updated.
You can download the Consolas font pack for Windows, free of charge, from the Microsoft download site; though, you may already have it - check your %WINDIR%\Fonts\ folder. If you also use a Mac, and want to install Consolas for use on that platform, you can follow these instructions and read this update. But check your fonts folder first! Depending on whether you have Microsoft Office installed (and which version), you might already have it.
Tabs
By default, the tabs for query editor windows contain a lot of information that is often irrelevant, redundant, or both: database name, file name, login name, and server name. Your mileage may vary, but personally, I open a lot of ad hoc query windows, and these are named SQLQuery<n>.sql - for these I do not care about the file name, and the other information is readily available in the status bar should I need it (which I usually don’t). So what I usually do is turn off those settings completely.
In Management Studio for SQL Server 2008, you have a lot more flexibility over what appears on the tabs. In Tools | Options, Text Editor, Editor Tab and Status Bar, you can remove any of the four items included on the tab by default, as well as the status bar content, location, and colors.
Presentations / Demos
If you are using Management Studio for presenting or giving demos, you probably want to follow some of Buck Woody’s great recommendations. These are not relevant exclusively to Management Studio but have certainly helped in a few of my SQL Server-related talks. The biggest one is setting the font size in Management Studio (both text editor and results) to something reasonably visible for those poor folks at the back of the room.
Startup
Last week, I posted a whole slew of recommendations for making Management Studio start faster.
Aaron Bertrand
Senior Data Architect, OTOlabs
http://www.otolabs.com
Tags: Management Studio; usability;
