Perhaps you would like to view your data outside of the PowerShell command window, or you would like to export results to a file.

One way to review your data outside of the powershell command window is to utilize the grid view. This can make reviewing bulk data a little easier than scrolling through the command window. We can use a previous example of querying ADGroup membership to demonstrate using the grid view for reviewing results. For example:

Get-ADGroupMember GroupName |Select-Object name |Out-GridView

This will display a window where you can review the specified properties that you have chosen. You can use the Out-GridView Command for some of the previous examples that I have covered, for example:

Get-ADComputer Computername -Properties * |Select-Object CN,Description |Out-Gridview

But let’s assume that you would rather have a file containing your results that you can work with, such as a text file. There are a couple of ways of achieving this. For example, you can utilize the out-file command and insert a file path for your file. Using our ADGroupMember example from above, it may look something like this:

Get-ADGroupMember GroupName |Select-Object name |Out-File C:\Users\YOURUSERNAME\Documents\OUTFILE.TXT

Exporting CSV Files

You can also export to .csv file types with the method above. However, I sometimes find that the data isn’t always “user-friendly” via this method for .csv files. For that reason, I’d like to cover the Export-CSV command. Using the same example as above with the export-csv command looks like this:

Get-ADGroupMember GroupName |Select-Object name |Export-csv C:\Users\YOURUSERNAME\Documents\OUTFILE.CSV -noTypeInformation

Notice the “-noTypeInformation” parameter at the end of the command. This excludes the “Type information” from being inserted as a header for the exported file. Unless you need the Type information (you probably do not), I recommend using the -noTypeInformation parameter at the end of your export-csv command. For an in-depth analysis about Type information, check out this article.