Windows 10: Export All Administrative Events to Excel

To analyze events, from the Windows Event Viewer, there is a simple way to export all Administrative Events to Excel, with PowerShell.

Exporting all Administrative Events to Excel is a simple two Step process, as described here:

Step 1 - Create the Administrative Events View .xml file

• Open Eventviewer (%windir%\system32\eventvwr.msc)
• Navigate to: Event Viewer (Local) > Custom Views > Administrative Events
• In the “Actions” pane select “Filter Current Custom View”.
• Select the the XML tab.
• Press Ctrl+A to select all the XML code of the Custom View.
• Open a notepad, paste the selected code and save the file to your Desktop as AdmEvtView.xml

Step 2 - Create the csv file with the events

• Download the ExportEvtCSV.zip file, which contains the script ExportEvtCSV.ps1 and unzip it, on your Desktop.
  It's not a fancy script, just basic PowerShell commands to create a csv file on the Desktop.
• In Windows Search, type “ISE” (without the quotes) to open “Windows PowerShell ISE” and Run as administrator
  
• To allow running the script, change the ExecutionPolicy, for this session. To do that, in the Console pane type:
  Code: Set-ExecutionPolicy -Scope Process -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -force[/quote]
• In the Windows PowerShell ISE, open and run the script: ExportEvtCSV.ps1
  The script will create a csv file with a name YYYYMMDD.HHMM.csv on the Desktop
• When done, open the newly created .csv file, format the columns as needed and optionally save it as .xlsx, if you wish.

That’s it! You now have all the Administrative Events in Excel for filtering and further analysis. *Smile

Now to the more technical hard stuff... *Confused

There is a reason for running the script from within PowerShell ISE!

It would be great if everything was also working perfectly, when running the script from an elevated PowerShell too.

We can run it from an elevated PowerShell, which means that you just follow the Step 1, as above but for the Step 2 instead of the ISE you run the script from an elevated PowerShell.

The problem is that it will work only for anybody who has en-US format for the dates. Everyone else, who has another format (i.e. en-GB, fr-FR, el-GR etc.), the dates are not translated properly by Excel (although the script uses the –UseCulture switch) and remain as text in the en-US format.

I'm not sure if this a bug of the "export-csv" cmdlet, but although it runs the way it supposed to from within the ISE, from PowerShell there is a problem with the dates format.
As I haven’t found a way to overcome this obstacle, any suggestion from the PowerShell gurus of the forum (like my good friend Shawn @Brink, for instance), is welcome.

:)

 

event viewer

Can you export your events to a csv for us to have a further look?

Link below on how to do this. Thanks

https://www.techwalla.com/articles/how-to-expor...

 

Phone Book Export to Excel

Unfortunately, there is no way to export the data that is stored on My Phone to Excel. In fact there is no way to download Phone Book data from My Phone directly to a computer. My Phone is a backup service that works exclusively with a windows mobile
phone. The only way to "download" this kind of data is by syncing it to a windows mobile phone.

Prof Julie |
Microsoft MVP Windows Phone |
pocketprimer.com | twitter

 

I can’t replicate this. The date formats in the output CSV of your script from both the PowerShell console and the ISE are similar for me.

Could you test around with the following line and see if you can still draw a difference.
Code: [pscustomobject]@{Foo='Bar';Date=Get-Date} | Export-Csv "$env:UserProfile\Desktop\csv.csv" -NoTypeInfo[/quote]

 

To replicate:
Run the script form an elevated PowerShell in whatever regional formats you have. In your case, I would guess English (Australian).
Open the csv produced, in Excel. According to what I get, you should have something like this –my Regional settings are English (Europe)- :

English (Europe)




Now go to Control Panel > Languages > Change date, time, or number formats and change the format to English (United States).
Open again the same csv in Excel. This time dates should be OK and you should have something like this:

English (United States)




The dates of the log, range from 11-Apr-2017 to 14-Apr-2017. Notice the difference in the format?
In the English (Europe) settings, the dates with day up to 12 are translated as December dates, whereas the days with date beyond 12 are not translated at all.

Change back to your Default Regional Settings. If you now run the script from an elevated ISE, when opened in Excel the dates are correct, regardless of the current regional settings.

Now regarding your recommendation, I ran the command from both ISE and PowerShell. As expected this is the output in Excel:

 

Hm, dunno, I think you’re crazy. I followed the steps as closely as possible and I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary.

Compare the $Host variable from both the PowerShell console and ISE and make sure the CurrentCulture property matches between them. This is the only variable I can think of that could cause a difference.

 

cultureinfo in ISE and PowerShell don't match... I'm not getting crazy, I just state facts!









The only way I have found so far, is to change the date format to the Default culture, so PowerShell does not use its own.

That changes the command to:

Code: Get-WinEvent -FilterXml ([xml](Get-Content "AdmEvtView.xml")) | Select-Object Level, LevelDisplayName, @{n='TimeCreated';e={Get-Date ($_.TimeCreated) -Format 'dd/MM/yyyy HH:mm:ss'}}, ProviderName, Id, Task, Message, LogName, UserId, TaskDisplayName, Version, Qualifiers, Opcode, OpcodeDisplayName, RecordId, ProcessId, ProviderId, ThreadId, ActivityId, RelatedActivityId, MachineName, Keywords, KeywordsDisplayNames, MatchedQueryIds, Bookmark, Properties | export-csv "$FileDate.csv" -UseCulture –NoTypeInformation[/quote]

 

The CultureInfo of your elevated PowerShell console isn’t correct if “English (Europe)” is your current locale. I wouldn’t have a reason why this is the case though.

If I change my locale either through the GUI or Set-Culture, the CultureInfo of both PowerShell hosts will match after restarting the program.

 

That's exactly what I'm saying. The English (Europe) [en-150] locale is correct, because this the locale I have chosen. ISE displays it correctly.
It's PowerShell that erroneously reports en-us. en-us is the installation language, not my locale.
Now why this discrepancy.... I have no clue!