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The first format command I'd like to show you is Format‑Table.

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Let's get stuck in.

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Let's check out the help by running help Format‑Table.

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So the synopsis here is pretty straightforward.

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It formats the output as a table. Sweet! There are a number

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of parameters available for Format‑Table,

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and we'll take a look at a bunch of them shortly.

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And there's, of course,

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a detailed description here if you'd like to read through that in your own time.

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Now there is an alias for Format‑Table.

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So if I run, Get‑Alias ‑Definition Format‑Table,

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we'll see the alias for this property is simply ft.

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You'll probably see that used a lot on the internet,

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and I personally use it a lot when I'm working at the console,

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as well, because it's just quicker to type.

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And no doubt you'll start to do the same.

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Let me run a command that I know doesn't output to a table by default,

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which is simply get‑date.

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This output here is actually quite customized by the PowerShell format system,

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but you can take a command, get‑date in this example,

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and then pipe it down to Format‑Table to force the

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output to be displayed in a table format.

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And it's very likely that the formatting files are telling PowerShell

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which properties to display here in this table.

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Similarly, I know the command Get‑Host will default to a list.

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Again, we can force this to a table simply by piping it to Format‑Table.

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You might notice there that the value of that last property

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is actually being truncated a little bit,

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and we get shown the three dots to let us know there is more data.

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Towards the end of this clip, I'll show you a way to stop that from happening.

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Okay, let's grab a command that does output to a table by default.

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So let's use Get‑Process.

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If I scroll up, you can see this is indeed a table,

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and there are headers at the top telling us what each column is.

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If I pipe Get‑Process to Format‑Table, well,

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I get exactly the same thing because the format system

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was already doing that by default.

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You can modify the properties being shown in the table in a few different ways.

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You could pipe Get‑Process to a select object,

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select the properties, and then pipe that down to Format‑Table.

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Alternatively,

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you could use the ‑Property parameter on Format‑Table to specify

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which properties you want to be displayed.

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Let's grab the Name, Responding, and Description properties.

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And there we go.

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I've still got the table,

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but this time I've got the specific properties that I asked for.

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I want to refer back to the help system for a moment to

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bring up help for the GroupBy parameter.

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I'll run Get‑Help Format‑Table and then specify the parameter GroupBy.

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If I scroll up here a little,

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there are a couple of things that I want to point out.

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Using this parameter will group the output in separate

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tables based on a property value.

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But, importantly,

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it says here that the GroupBy parameter expects the objects are sorted already,

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so use the Sort‑Object cmdlet before using Format‑Table to group the objects.

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Sweet!

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No worries at all.

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Let's give it a go.

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If we run Get‑Process,

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first we need to pipe that to Sort‑Object like the help told us to.

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And I want to sort the results based on the ProcessName property.

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Now that we've followed the rules and sorted,

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we can pipe that down to Format‑Table and use the GroupBy parameter

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to group the results based on the ProcessName.

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And check this out, the results are now in individual little tables,

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but they're all grouped according to their ProcessName.

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You can see here there's only one process for winlogon,

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so there's just one result there.

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But there are two processes for WmiPrvSE,

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and they're grouped together at the bottom.

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If I scroll back quickly, you'll see everything is grouped out pretty nicely.

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Another thing we can do while using GroupBy is also change the

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properties being displayed in the output.

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So, again, just like before,

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if I put in the ‑Property parameter and then grab the Name,

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Responding, and Description properties,

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it will still group the results for me based on the ProcessName,

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but it will only display the properties I've asked for.

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There are a couple of other functions of Format‑Table that I'd like to show you.

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Let's run Get‑WinEvent to grab Windows event log data from the

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application log, and let's just limit the results here to 5 so we

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don't get too much data in the console.

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Okay, so by default, we get results formatted as a table, which is cool.

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But there are a few things here.

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Firstly,

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there's a bit of dead space here between the TimeCreated and the ID properties.

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Secondly,

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the message is being cut off in all of the results because

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it's too long to show on the screen.

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Let's run that again but, this time, pipe it to Format‑Table. Now doing

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just that would result in exactly the same thing.

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So let's pop on the ‑AutoSize parameter. This time, if you look closely,

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PowerShell's done a better job of trying to make the most of the PowerShell

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console real estate to display as much information as it can.

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You can see the gap between TimeCreated and ID has been closed,

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which has allowed us to see a little bit more of the message,

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but it's still getting cut off.

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Another capability we have is to use the ‑Wrap parameter of Format‑Table,

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which will tell PowerShell to wrap the values of the properties being

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displayed to us so we can see the entire value on screen.

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A couple of other quick things to take a look at before we move on.

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Let me run, Get‑Process again and pipe it to Format‑Table,

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and there's a parameter named ‑RepeatHeader.

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If I scroll back a little bit,

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you'll see the table header is repeated every so often,

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and you might be wondering, Matt,

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why? This can be handy if you do something like pipe it to the more command.

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So those table headers will be repeated at every page scroll for

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your PowerShell console. So you don't need to keep scrolling up and

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down to see what the values represent.

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Finally, there's also a parameter named ‑HideTableHeaders,

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which,

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as you can probably guess from the name, is going to show the

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table but without the headers displayed. We'll only get the columns and the values of the properties.