The Format-Table command in PowerShell displays objects in a fundamentally similar manner as Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. Microsoft Excel provides a conditional formatting feature that enables spreadsheet builders to change the display format of a cell, based on the value of the cell's contents.

It would be really great if a PowerShell user could add conditional formatting rules to object properties, using the Format-Table command. That way, let's say you have an object with a Status property. That property could be emitted as Green if its value is Success or Red if the property value is Failed.

Name   Status
----   ------
Step 1 Failed (Red)
Step 2 Success (Green)

For example, you could add a custom property specifier in the Format-Table command as follows:

Get-SomeObjects | Format-Table -Property Name, @{ Name = 'Status'; Color = 'Green'; Value = '^Success$' }

In PowerShell today, we already have a similar syntax for building "calculated properties." We could leverage a similar syntax to build colorized expressions in data tables. This capability would be useful to build PowerShell-based dashboards and presenting data in a more useful manner in the console.

Cheers,
Trevor Sullivan