Format Output Data to Expose More of the Information You Want

Article
08/31/2016

Tip: Format Output Data to Expose More of the Information You Want

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When you work with the Exchange Management Shell, the standard output won’t necessarily provide all the information you are looking for. Often, you need to format the output as a list or table using Format-List or Format-Table, respectively, to get the additional information you desire.

Format-List comes in handy when you are working with a small set of resources or want to view all the properties that are available. Once you know what properties are available for a particular resource, you can format the output as a table to view specific properties.

For example, if you format the output of Get-MailboxStatistics as a list, you see all the properties that are available for mailboxes, as shown in this example and sample output:
get-mailboxstatistics -identity "cpandl\daniele" | format-list

Output

AssociatedItemCount : 2655 
DeletedItemCount : 121 
DisconnectDate : 
DisplayName : Daniel Escapa 
ItemCount : 2451 
LastLoggedOnUserAccount : NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM 
LastLogoffTime : 6/15/2010 12:58:18 PM 
LastLogonTime : 6/15/2010 12:58:14 PM 
LegacyDN : /O=FIRST ORGANIZATION/OU=EXCHANGE ADMINISTRATIVE GROUP/CN=RECIPIENTS/CN=DANIEL ESCAPA 
MailboxGuid : d3f6ce55-fe3d-4beb-ae65-9c9f7edaf995c
ObjectClass : Mailbox 
StorageLimitStatus : BelowLimit 
TotalDeletedItemSize : 97 KB (97,235 bytes) 
TotalItemSize : 1155.11 KB (1,155,445 bytes) 
Database : Customer Service Primary 
ServerName : CORPSERVER45 
DatabaseName : Customer Service Primary 
MoveHistory : 
IsQuarantined : False 
IsArchiveMailbox : False 
Identity : d3f6ce44-fe0c-4beb-ae79-9c9f8eaf123c 
MapiIdentity : d3f6ce44-fe0c-4beb-ae79-9c9f8eaf123c 
OriginatingServer : corpserver45.cpandl.com 
IsValid : True

Once you know the available properties, you can format the output as a table to get exactly the information you want to see. In this example, you get information about all the mailboxes in the Engineering Primary database and format the output as a table:
Get-MailboxStatistics -Database 'Engineering Primary' | format-table DisplayName, TotalItemSize, TotalDeletedItemSize, Database, ServerName

From the Microsoft Press book Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Administrator’s Pocket Consultant by William R. Stanek.

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