SSMS – How to Persist Custom Keyboard Shortcuts

Here's a long shot: I think your Management Studio has for some reason changed the keyboard mappings to the 2012/2014 default setup, which is more similar to the regular Visual Studio apps. This changed as of SQL Server 2012 so, among other things, Ctrl+F1 now opens Books On-Line.

To verify if this is the case for you, you probably won't be able to execute queries using Ctrl+E or view estimated query plans using Ctrl+L.

I found a way to reset the keyboard shortcuts to the "classic" setup and wrote a blog post about it a while ago. The short version is:

• Open the "Tools" menu i SSMS,
• Select "Import and Export settings...",
• Select the "Reset all settings" option, click "Next",
• On the last page of the wizard, you have the option to back up your current settings. I would recommend you to do this.

Hope that helps.

The option is still there (although this is from SQL Server 2014):

You don't normally have to restart SSMS, just open a new query window.