Great.... It really helped .. Thanks...

You can also right click on table and choose: Script table as - Select to - New query editor window

I typically use the method highlighted by Jan Novak.

Thanks for sharing, Dattatrey!

I used to use select "columns" method only..

Nice tip. Too bad it doesn't put the column's names intro square brackets though.

I use something else: after typing "SELECT * FROM TableName", I select the query and press Ctrl+Shift+Q ("Design in query editor") then select OK.

The Query Designer would do the trick. If you would like to know more on the query designer, do check out my post here - SSMS – Query Designer – Ad-hoc query writing/editing made simple

I think the method posted by Jan Novak is faster.

I usually issue the following command to get a list of all columns in a table or view:

sp_help [table-or-view-name]

(This is command also usually bound to the Alt+F1 key, so type the tablename out, highlight it and do Alt+F1)

You can then copy & paste the column names from the resultset up into your query pane. I find this invaluable - I must do sp_help a hundred times a day when I'm writing queries and want to remind myself what a column is called...

Great to know so many different ways to achieve this :)

you can directly right-click on the table name in object explorer of SSMS and click on "Select TOP 1000 rows" option the query will be opened in a new query window and there you can make your changes to the query.

Square bracket is required to remove the conflict between SQL keyword and column name.

I am always using 'Select To' to generate the column list because it is giving result with square bracket in column as well as in table name.

This is good practice, becasue it does allow one to get all the columns for a table quickly. As for Sergejack's wish, one can solve that simply by using another trick, which is the do a quick "find and replace" within the SQL client query interface.

If you're not familiar with that, simply press "Ctrl+H" or go to the "Edit" sub menu, select "Find and Replace", and then select "Quick Replace". Once the dialog windows presents itself, simply replace all "," with "], [". For example,

select Field1, Field2, Field3, Field4, Field5, .... from Table_A

After using the "Find and Replace" feature, you will have

select Field1], [Field2], [Field3], [Field4], [Field5 ... from Table_A

after which point you can just add a starting bracket, "[", and ending bracke, "]", to complete your wish.

select [Field1], [Field2], [Field3], [Field4], [Field5] ... from Table_A

dint know these many ways are used..

I am so glad to learn this shortcut. Thanks!

great this is more helpful for us

Excelent tip!

Thank you! :)

It's a nice and quick way but I always use @Jan Novak 's way.

Hi,

I write SQL "select * from tablename" then highlight entire select statement and right click open in "Design in Query Editor" and copy from every all code from Query editor and paste back to SSMS query.Uses SSMS tool to format it.

thanks Nachi

Hi All,

By querying INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS and using COALESCE() Function, all the table names can be selected and seperated by comma and can be even sorted by column name.

DECLARE @i VARCHAR(MAX) 
SELECT @i = COALESCE(@i + ', ','') + '[' + COLUMN_NAME + ']'
FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS
WHERE TABLE_NAME = 'Your Table Name' 
ORDER BY COLUMN_NAME
SELECT @i