Format-Wide

PowerShell Cmdlet Deep Dive: Format-Wide

Welcome back to Wahmans PowerShell blog! Today, we are going to explore a simple yet visually powerful cmdlet in PowerShell: Format-Wide. According to Microsoft, Format-Wide "Formats objects as a wide table that displays only one property of each object."

This makes it a great tool when you want to view a large list of items quickly in a wide, multi-column style for easier scanning. It’s especially handy when working in the terminal and keeping things human-readable matters.

Getting Started with Format-Wide

Format-Wide is ideal for formatting and presenting data—not for converting or filtering it. You generally use it at the end of a pipeline to display just one property from a collection of objects.

Example 1: Display a List of Services

Let’s list all services by their display name. This basic example is great for beginners:

Get-Service | Format-Wide -Property DisplayName

This will output services in multiple columns, showing just their DisplayName.

Example 2: Display All Running Processes by Name

Get-Process | Format-Wide -Property Name -Column 4

Here, we specify -Column 4 to format the process names into four columns on the screen.

Example 3: Custom Object Formatting

$files = Get-ChildItem -Path C:\Windows -File
$files | Format-Wide -Property Name

This command lists files in the Windows folder and displays just their names. Very helpful when you only care about what’s in a directory and not the metadata.

Example 4: Using Format-Wide with ScriptBlock for Dynamic Display

1..10 | ForEach-Object { [PSCustomObject]@{ ID = $_; Square = $_ * $_ } } | Format-Wide { $_.ID }

In this more advanced use case, we create objects with two properties and then use a script block to dynamically display only the ID property in the output.

Tips When Using Format-Wide

Use it only at the end of the pipeline: it formats data for display, not for further processing.
One property only: Format-Wide is designed to show a single property.
Combine with sorting: Use Sort-Object before Format-Wide to organize your output better.

That’s all for today on using Format-Wide to clean up and enhance your PowerShell output. It may not be the most powerful cmdlet, but mastering display tools like this makes scripts more user-friendly and results easier to comprehend.

Happy scripting, and I will see you in the next post!