Overview of the user interface in Toad for SQL Server

Hello, my name is Robert Pound, and I am a Quest technologist. This video walks through the user interface and Toad for SQL. At the top of the tool, we have the traditional dropdown menu with all the features available in the tool. This list expands depending on what we have open, so if we have an editor open, we will have an editor and debug dropdown menu. The ribbon bar has all the commonly used features of the tool and is available for your convenience. There are two primary views in the tool itself. That is the connection manager and the object explorer. If one of those views is missing, you can come up to view, and select the one that you need. Since I've brought the connection manager back in, the object explorer is now minimized. I can simply hover to the edge and drag it up, and now both windows are visible. If I wanted this window in another location, I could simply click and drag around the tool, and while I'm dragging, you can see that the icons pop up, so that I can dock this window to different areas of the tool itself. For instance, if I wanted a side by side view of the object explorer and the connection manager, I could have it. I'm going to bring this back to its original location. And to the right, you can also see some of the windows available that I currently have but are on auto hide. So if you want to unhide these, you can select a push pin. That will permanently dock this window so that it's visible all the time. And, again, to autohide, I can simply push the push pin again, and it will be minimized. And looking at the object explorer for a second, all the objects available for a given connection, you can view here in the object explorer, and you can change the way that you view them as well. So currently, this isn't a dropdown view. So once you've selected the database from the dropdown, you can also select which category of objects you want to view. You can change that to look at tabbed and tab multi-line. And what this will do is give you, instead of a dropdown list, a list of tabs, and you can scroll through. Or in the multi-line view you can have all the tabs at once on screen. And you can also select tree list and flat tree list. This gives you an expandable hierarchy of objects that you can view for a given connection. And finally, if you want to change the look and feel of the tool itself, you can come to options and choose configuration wizard. And there are some prepackaged settings, but I am going to choose custom . And I can choose things like skin color. So if I wanted a darker look, and change the grid. And you can change the object explorer's default style. So tree list, multi-tabbed, etc. And you can also choose whether you want to see the connection window on startup or the connection manager at all. And finally, upon establishing a connection, you can choose to have a new editor window open up, a query builder open up, or a database explorer. And that's it. Short and simple. I hope this video helped you understand a little bit more about the user interface in Toad for SQL. For more information on this product, you may visit www.quest.com/products/toad-for-sql-server. You may also check out www.toadworld.com to get insight from the database professionals there. Thank you, and good luck in all future endeavors.