In this chapter, we have walked through the PowerShell formatting system. We saw that PowerShell hosts use Out-Default to cause formatting to happen to all the output. We looked at the rules to format objects, when no explicit formatting instructions are included, as well as the cmdlets to tell PowerShell exactly how we want objects to be formatted. Finally, we discovered that formatting is something of a destructive operation, in which the original objects are no longer available after the formatting has occurred.

In the next chapter, we will take our first steps towards packaging sequences of commands for reuse in scripts.