Save yourself a huge headache later

How many times have you had to write a quick query in SQL Management Studio for someone and then export the data to Excel? Exporting data from SQL Server is a fairly long and multi-step process, but once you've done it a few times, it's not too bad.

One thing I learned about saving SQL query results in Excel or CSV format is that it's better to use the SQL Import and Export Wizard rather than right-clicking the results and saving them.

You can always right-click and choose Save Results As, but the CSV file you get will have no column headers! This is a royal pain when you have 50 columns.