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When compared to formatting tables and lists, this last

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format style that I want to bring to your attention being

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format‑wide, it's definitely used less,

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but it can be useful in specific scenarios,

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so I want you to be across it.

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Let's take a look. If we bring up our trusty help again with help Format‑Wide,

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you'll see that format‑wide formats objects as a wide table that

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displays only one property of each object being formatted.

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It's got some similar parameters that format table and format list have.

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And if I run Get‑Alias ‑Definition format‑wide, it has an alias of fw.

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Okay, let's just run this and see what it does.

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We'll go with Get‑Process and pipe that to format‑wide. As promised by the

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help, we've got just a single property of each object,

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which in this case,

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is the process name and it's formatted that on the screen in

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this kind of wide table view. Before we play around with any of

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the other parameters for format‑wide,

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how do you think it decided which property to show us, by

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default, for the process object type.

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If you're thinking that is defined in the format

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definitions, you are absolutely correct.

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Let's take a quick look at the format data for the process object type and we

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can do that by opening the XML file that we exported a couple of clips ago

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containing the format instructions for a process object.

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So I'll run notepad C:\Docs and then process.xml, and let

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me make that full screen, and scroll down to the very last

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view that's defined here.

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We can see that it's a wide view and check out this line here.

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The WideItem that's defined is the ProcessName property so

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it's not just luck that you're being shown the ProcessName

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as the default property.

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Let's jump back to the console and check out a few of the other parameters.

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So Get‑Process, pipe that to Format‑Wide,

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let's check out AutoSize first. So the AutoSize will fit the results on the

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display as best it can and that looks pretty good to me.

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There is a parameter named column that can be used to hard define

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how many columns format‑wide will output to.

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So let's try 3 and that looks okay. Let's try 5. Now it mostly looks okay,

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but note down here to the right that one of these

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values is now starting to get cut off.

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That's why autosize determined that four columns was best for this output.

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Now you could do something like 20, which is not really going to be very useful,

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right?

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So just be careful what you wish for.

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All of these results have been displaying the process name, but

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we can override which property is being shown by format wide by

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using the property parameter.

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Let's ask for the ID.

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Cool. It looks okay, but there's a lot of wasted screen there.

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Let's set that to four columns.

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Yeah, that looks a little bit better.

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Lastly, format‑wide does have the ability to group objects as

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well similar to the other formatting commands. So if we roll with

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Get‑Service this time and remember, we need to sort it before grouping,

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so I'll pipe that across to sort object,

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and I want to sort on the property named Status so results get

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grouped based on whether the service is stopped or running.

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From there, we can pipe that down to format‑wide and we can

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group by the Status property.

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If I scroll up a little bit here, you can see that all of these

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services down here that are grouped are running.

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And if I scroll all the way up to the top, all of these ones group together at the top are stopped.