How do I get my data in Excel?

With a simple copy/paste.  Since SQL Server 2008, you can just right-click on the results in the Management Studio and select Copy with Headers.  This will put the selected data into memory, including the column headers.

You can even make a selection in the Results pane and only copy that, as shown in the screenshot above.  Here’s what it looks like when pasted into Excel:

How do I make the columns wider?

Excel will not expand the column widths by default, shown in that last screenshot.  You could manually enlarge them one by one, but that’s not convenient when you last filled column is called “DI”.  Instead, I use the following trick.  First I select the whole sheet by clicking on the grey square in the top-left corner:

Then I double-click on the vertical divider in between columns A and B.  This will adjust all column widths so that the data fits nicely.

Does Excel know SELECT DISTINCT?

The other day I needed to filter out all duplicate records out of a really large dataset.  I first tried by activating the regular filter.  This is an Excel feature that I use a lot.  Just clicking the Filter button on the Data ribbon will add the small dropdowns next to each column’s header:

But in those dropdowns I couldn’t find an option which would get me to the required result.

(Note that I added a couple of duplicate records in my dataset.)

After a little search, I found the magic checkbox!  I didn’t know that it could be so easy.

To find it, click the Advanced button in the Data ribbon.

In the Advanced Filter window that appears you see a checkbox called Unique records only.

There’s your SELECT DISTINCT!

And here’s the sheet with the duplicates filtered out:

Do you also see that the filter dropdowns are gone, although I did not remove them?  The Advanced Filter cannot be used in combination with the regular filter.  Once you activate the regular filter by clicking the Filter button, your duplicates will re-appear.

If you want to further filter your data after filtering out all duplicate records, you should select the Copy to another location option in the Advanced Filter window.  Copy it below your data on the same sheet and apply the regular filter on that new set of data.

Copying to another sheet is not supported.  Apparently you can only copy to the active sheet.  Should you try it out anyway, you’ll get this message:

Happy filtering!

Valentino.

When a cell (or a range of cells) is selected, you see a thicker black border around the selection and the bottom-right corner has got a small square attached.

You can drag that squared corner down to get copy-like behaviour. More precisely, when one cell is selected and you drag it down then the value of the selected cell gets copied over into the cells further down, up until the cell where you stop dragging.

Note: the same effect also works horizontally but in real-life circumstances you probably won’t need it much.

When multiple cells are selected and you drag the bottom-right corner down, Excel will apply some logic to continue the series that it possibly detects.

For instance if you have two cells selected with the values 2 and 4, the next cells will get 6, 8, and so on. Or when the first cell contains 2010/10/30 and the second 2010/10/25, the next cells will get date values going down by 5 days per cell.

If you don’t like the way the series gets applied, there’s a dropdown poping up at the bottom-right of the new selection at the moment that you stop dragging. In that list you get several different Auto Fill Options, depending on the data type of your selected cells.

I’m sure this is no news to you so far.

But do you know what happens when you just double-click that small bottom-right corner instead of dragging it?

I didn’t, until I just tried it out this past week. The reason that I tried this was because I needed a formula copied down in about 20,000 rows (hey, I’m a data guy, remember?) and I didn’t want to waste my time waiting for Excel to scroll down just to the bottom of the list while dragging the corner. So I double-clicked and there came the discovery of the week! It applied the same function as what you get when you drag the corner down, all the way down to the last row of data! Isn’t that great? From now on I think I’ll always just double-click instead of drag, much faster!

And you even get the same popup to select another Fill Option.

Have Fun!

Valentino.