Changing column order in SQL and in Power BI

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Tricks to change column order in SQL and in Power BI
Two little tricks to change the order of columns in SQL Server Management Studio and Power BI Query Editor, which (to our shame?) we've only just discovered.

Posted by Andy Brown on 04 March 2024

In this blog

Changing column order in SQL Server Management Studio
Reversing columns in Power BI Query Editor

Do you know either of these tricks?

Changing column order in SQL Server Management Studio

So you've written or run a query to list out some films, but want to show the film title first:

A query listing some films.

Obviously one way to do this is to change your SQL:

SELECT

f.Title

, f.OscarWins

, f.RunTimeMinutes

FROM

Film as f

However, you can also click and drag columns in the Results window:

Click and drag the Title column and release your mouse button exactly as shown above.

Despite the underwhelming mouse pointer support, this does actually work!

This obviously won't affect the underlying SQL, but can be useful when you're looking at (or copying) the output from a query.

Reversing columns in Power BI Query Editor

I think this trick is even more unexpected. Suppose you want to reverse the order of these first 3 columns in Power BI's Query Editor:

The title should go first, followed by the Oscar nominations, followed by the Oscar wins.

To do this, select the Title column first:

Start with this column selected.

Now hold the Shift key down and click on the first column:

Click on the OscarWins column with the Shift key held down.

Now drag the last column you selected over the first:

Click on the OscarWins column and drag it to the position shown (the column title bar is showing you the new order that you'll get), then release the mouse button.

Eureka!