Let that boy copy paste (with SQL2005 and Excel)

I heard Papa tell Mama

Let that boy copy paste from SQLServer2005 to Excel
It's in him

And it got to come out

John Lee Hooker - Boogie Chillen (1948)

Being a software engineer - I pretty much hate messing with DBs.

Nonetheless, more often than not, even the brightest designers - such as myself - are called to get their hands dirty with some SQL or moving some data around when the team's DB guy (usually indian) is badly sick at home.

I remember how painful it was the first time I had to understand with SQL2000 how to export to excel a simple resultset from a select - must have wasted a full afternoon of frustration trying to do that a few years back. 

A couple of months ago I was shocked in discovering that with SQL2005 you can just select all and copy/paste a resultset to excel. This means that if you have to import/export some records you don't need to mess with import/export wizards and all that comes after. Shrinking to 3 clicks (select all - copy - paste) a 5 minutes painful procedure. 

Forget about TRY CATCH, CLR support, and all that fancy stuff, copy/paste to/from excel is my favourite SQL2005 new feature (ok - this sounds something like 3 years late, but it's not what this post is about).

DB purists might not like it but copy/paste is "de way 2 go".