Summary

This is quite a long chapter and it is really only an introduction. We will cover more ways of ingesting data with PowerShell as we go through the book. We’ve come a long way, though.

We started out by looking at how we can format output for the screen using three common formatting cmdlets: Format-List, Format-Table, and Format-Wide. We then looked at how we could output that formatted data to a text file with Out-File. We took some time to understand the limitations of this approach before we explored two families of cmdlets: ConvertTo- and Export-.

We took quite a deep look at the cmdlets for handling CSV files, ConvertTo-Csv and Export-Csv, and understood how the ExportTo-Csv cmdlet combines the ConvertTo-Csv and Out-File cmdlets. We then looked at ConvertTo-Xml and Export-Clixml. Finally, we looked at ConvertTo-Html and experimented with how we can use it to produce interestingly formatted documents by referencing a CSS file.

We then briefly discussed PSProviders...