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When you're getting started with formatting in PowerShell,

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there are a few things I often see,

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and I absolutely ran into these when I got started as well.

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Hopefully,

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I can show you a couple of things to be aware of to

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save you some pain and confusion.

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Firstly, when you think of formatting in PowerShell,

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always remember to format right.

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I don't mean format correctly; I mean format right, as in the direction.

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What is meant by that is that any formatting you want to do

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should be the last thing on your pipeline,

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which is always to the very right‑hand side of the pipeline.

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The reason is that pretty much the only thing you can do with

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formatted data is send it to an Out cmdlet.

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Let's look at an example of that.

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I'll run Get‑Process and pipe that to Format‑List.

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At this point, I might be like, I really only want the name and id properties,

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so I'll just pipe that across to select,

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which is shorthand for select object, and grab the name and id.

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When I run that, there's nothing in the output here.

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If I scroll all the way back up, I have columns for the name and id,

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but no values are coming through.

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Similarly, if you tried to do the same but pipe it to something like Sort‑Object,

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this time we're going to get a hard error.

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And if you read the error, you'll actually get a hint as to what is going on.

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It's complaining that the object type,

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which is this internal formatting object here,

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is not valid or not in the correct sequence,

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which is likely caused by a user‑specified format command

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conflicting with the default formatting.

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Quick sidebar: Make sure to take the time to read errors in PowerShell.

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They actually do help.

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So let's distill that down.

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Why is this happening?

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Well, let's run Get‑Process and pipe that to Get‑Member,

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and I'm going to pipe that to the more command so it

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doesn't scroll off the screen.

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Remember,

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the object types we get from running Get‑Process are

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these system diagnostic process objects,

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and they all have these properties that are listed on the screen here.

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If I press space a few times to page through the results,

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we'll see lots of different properties on the process object.

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Those properties are all available as that object is sent down the pipeline.

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But look at what happens when we pipe Get‑Process to Format‑List.

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We'll pipe that to Get‑Member,

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and you might be expecting to see the same process

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object types here and the properties.

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But what's actually in the pipeline now are these internal

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formatting types and properties because we've sent our

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objects to a format command.

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So, really,

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the rule to remember here is always have your format command as

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the last command in the chain or to the right.

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So if we repeat Get‑Process,

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this time pipe it to the select command to grab the name and id,

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and then send it down to Format‑List, we get the output we expected.

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Now that I've told you to always format last,

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there is one exception to that,

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and we've been using it already in this demo without really realizing it.

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But the exception here is that you can send formatted

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data to PowerShell's Out cmdlets.

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Remember, Out‑Default and Out‑Host are always bolted on to the end.

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Technically,

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we've been sending the data to both of those in all of these examples.

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The Out cmdlets know how to deal with formatted data coming down the pipeline.

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Let's use a specific example of Out‑File,

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which will take the formatted data and simply pass

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it to an unstructured text file.

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So I'll grab that last command, which ends with Format‑List,

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and then pipe it to Out‑File.

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I'll drop this in C:\Docs and just call it processes.txt.

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No errors and no warnings.

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So let's read that back in by running Get‑Content and

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specifying the path to the text file we created.

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And, yep, there's the data we sent out in the list format.

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Let's just pause here and summarize because I need

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to hit you with another caveat.

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So, firstly, leave your formatting until last or to the right.

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The exception to that is if you're piping the results to an Out command,

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in which case it's okay to have the format command piped to an Out command.

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The caveat here is a specific Out command named Out‑GridView,

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which is a command that we'll look out in more depth in the next module,

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but Out‑GridView cannot accept formatted data.

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Let me press the up arrow to bring that command back,

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and this time I'll pipe Format‑List to Out‑GridView.

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Yeah, we get an error that the data format is not supported by Out‑GridView.

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Out‑GridView is expecting unformatted data.

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So if we get rid of our format command, it'll pop up just fine.

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The final thing here that I'd like to mention,

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and this really only applies if you're starting to

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build your own scripts or functions,

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but please do not use any of the format commands inside of a

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script or function that you might end up authoring.

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You should always be returning PowerShell objects,

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and then you can leave it up to the user to decide on

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what they want to do with the data, which may or may not be to format it.

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When you hardcode formatting in,

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you severely limit the usefulness of that script or command.

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If you want to provide custom formatting for the code you're

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writing, then I'd suggest you look into skilling up on creating the custom view definitions.