Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2008 All-In-One Desk Reference For Dummies®

III.3.3. Exporting Your Query or Results

Both queries and results of queries can be exported or saved for later.

Say the sales department staff regularly asks you to retrieve a listing of all the sales to a specific customer; however, the customer they're interested in is different each time they ask. You can create a query each time, pull it up, edit it, and retrieve exactly the information you need.

Queries are saved as SQL scripts with the .sql extension. By double-clicking an SQL query file, the SQL script opens in a new query window in SSMS. (Similar to how Microsoft Word opens when you double-click a document with a .doc extension.)

So far, you've ran the queries, but no one (other than you) has seen the results. By saving the results to a file, you can give them to others. For example, you can share the results in an e-mail attachment. How the results are saved is dependent on how they're displayed.

You can save results of queries in three different ways. Each choice is selected via a button on the SQL Editor toolbar, or by choosing one via the QueryResults To menu item. The choices are:

• Results to Grid: The grid is the default output. It's similar to a Microsoft Excel Worksheet grid, with each data item having its own cell. The output can be saved to a comma-separated value file (CSV), which can be easily read by Microsoft Excel or a text editor.

• Results to Text: The output ...