Updated to include how you access presenter mode in SSMS 20, if you can’t yet upgrade to 21 for some reason.

Based on the name of this feature, you probably think it is a feature that you should only care about if you do presentations. That is so not the case. in fact, I don’t foresee me using this in presentations nearly as often in my normal workday.

What is presenter mode? It is a mode where SQL Server Management Studios (SSMS) Install SQL Server Management Studio | Microsoft Learn that allows you to make everything on the screen larger. Ostensibly, this is a feature that you will use when you want to show people something on your screen in a presentation, where things are really small on the screen because they are on a big screen, but also hard to read.

While I know that it is in SSMS 21, I only heard about this because the wonderful Bob Ward | LinkedIn mentioned it in a LinkedIn post/reply that I cannot find anymore. He said something like “It’s back”. I didn’t originally see it in my SSMS 20.2 version, but I have been set straight and made mention of it at the end of this article. Thankfully I had not dreamed it. It still has been a pretty weird month and a half, but not that weird.

Quick Demo

For the first step of this quick demo, I will simply use the defaults. The first picture is my normal screen:

Then, by going to the View/Presenter Mode/Toggle Presenter Mode menu:

You get a nice bump in size for the menus, dialogs, and (here is a really nice one) even the grid:

Very nice.

But wait… There’s more!

If you need a larger (or perhaps smaller, but my eyes are more likely) bump in the size of fonts and visual items, you can set your own settings. Just go to the View/Presenter Mode/Edit Presenter Mode dialog and you will get a small XML dialog that will let you customize the settings:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
  <PresenterModeSettings>
  <EnvironmentFontFamily>Segoe UI</EnvironmentFontFamily>
  <EnvironmentFontSize>11</EnvironmentFontSize>
  <TextEditorFontFamily>Consolas</TextEditorFontFamily>
  <TextEditorFontSize>14</TextEditorFontSize>
</PresenterModeSettings>

Now you can set your own fonts, and font sizes specifically for presenter mode. For example, change the EnvironmentFontSize to 3, and save the XML:

Now you basically have a new entry for Rob Volk’s Revenge: The SQL! presentation. Because unless you know about presenter mode, this could take you a while to figure out (since you can’t currently zoom these other items).

In normal cases, your SSMS will open back up in presenter mode, and this is a very nice thing. Unfortunately for me, I didn’t swap back from the very small font, so it took a bit of precision editing to get back to the normal SSMS settings for Presenter Mode. (This is done using the View/Presenter Mode/Restore Default Fonts menu.);

If you want to have multiple settings, currently you could just save off files (or use something like Redgate’s SQL Prompt, or SSMS Templates and keep custom settings ready for use.). The settings are just a file, mine are located in "C:\Users\myname\AppData\Local\Microsoft\SSMS\21.0_107a3fad"
on one machine, and at "C:\Users\MyOtherName\AppData\Local\Microsoft\SSMS\21.0_e2466908\qlt_presentermode_defaults.xml"
, so there doesn’t appear to be any way to specifically know where to save off these settings yourself (at least none that my T-SQL programming skills could muster!)

Summary

Whether you need it for a presentation, or just to bump up many of the dialogs in SSMS occasionally/temporarily when working, presenter mode in SSMS 21 is an excellent addition to the tool (and my toolset to help me see the screen better sometimes!)

Presenter Mode in SSMS 20

Erin Stellato, who works on SSMS at Microsoft noted on my LinkedIn message about this post that you could get Presenter Mode in SSMS 20 using the Quick Launch menu. I personally had never used the Quick Launch menu before, but there it was:

Since Bob had noted that it was new, I figured it had been there, but I couldn’t find it. But you can see you can turn it on, off, and edit the font and font sizes. Editing the fonts works very similar to SSMS 21.