Alt Key in SSMS

The Alt key in SQL Server Management Studio, functions as “vertical mode”. If we press the alt button whilst clicking and dragging the mouse, we can select a vertical block of text like this:

When then press Tab to insert spaces, or press Delete to delete the word KPI from all 3 lines in one go.

After pressing Delete, we can type “Target” and the word Target will be inserted in all 3 lines in one go, like this:

The vertical blue line is the cursor. When this blue line appear, we can press shift-left or shift-right to block text in “vertical mode”. Press shift-down or shift-up will extend/reduce the blocked text by 1 line, like this:

When some text is highlighted like the above, we can find or replace any text, within just the selected area. To do that, just press ctrl-F or ctrl-H like this:

Also, when some text is highlighted in vertical mode, we can drag them to the right or to the left (all 3 lines in one go), like this:

When we want to type the same thing on many lines, press alt, highlight 1 character/column over many lines, and start typing, like this:

Hope this helps.

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