Let’s quickly review. You know that PowerShell cmdlets produce objects and that those objects often contain more properties than PowerShell shows by default. You know how to use gm to get a list of all of an object’s properties, and you know how to use Select-Object to specify the properties you want to see. Up to this point in the book, you’ve relied on PowerShell’s default configuration and rules to determine how the final output will appear on the screen (or in a file, or in hard-copy form). In this chapter, you’ll learn to override those defaults and create your own formatting for your commands’ output.
We don’t want to give the impression that PowerShell is a full-fledged management-reporting tool, because it isn’t. But PowerShell has good capabilities for collecting information, and, with the right output, you can certainly produce reports using that information. The trick is getting the right output, and that’s what formatting is all about.