Using Everything search command line (es.exe) via PowerShell

Everything by voidtools is a great search utility for Windows. It returns almost instantaneous results for file and folder searches by utilizing the Master File Table(s). There is also a command-line version of everything (es.exe) and this post is about a wrapper I wrote in PowerShell around es.exe. The full version including full help (which …

Convert between US and European date formats in Excel

The easiest way I know of (please let me know if you know a better way) to convert between US ("mm/dd/yy") and European ("dd/mm/yy") dates without using VBA in Excel is via "Text to Columns". Let's look at an example: My system's regional settings are setup for US dates, therefore I need to convert the …

Use PowerShell to measure the time to download a file

It is actually surprisingly easy to measure how long it takes to download a file with PowerShell. Let's look at an example: My internet speed is according to speedtest.net around 4.2 Mbps (megabits/second). If I would like to know how long it takes me to download a file of 1GB I can use a simple …

“Please wait while windows configures Microsoft Visual Studio…” when starting Excel

I got this dialog ("Please wait while windows configures Microsoft Visual Studio Professional 2013") on every Excel (2010) start up shortly after I had installed Visual Studio 2013 Community Edition. In my case it delayed the Excel start-up for several minutes. In order to get rid of the quite annoying dialog I just created a …

PowerShell scope write-up

I have seen and experienced myself quite some confusion and frustration around the application and understanding of scope using PowerShell. This is an attempt to write up a summary of the different aspects of how PowerShell handles scope which hopefully helps some people to understand it better. TOC: Definition and purpose of scope Lexical vs. …

PowerShell and the “missing” ternary operator

People switching to PowerShell from other languages like JavaScript or C# might be looking for a ternary operator at one point. While there is no built-in ternary operator in PowerShell it is not too hard to come up with something that comes pretty close to it. Let's look at an example: This defines a (admittedly …

Waiting for elements presence with Selenium Web driver

Selenium is a great way to automate browsers for testing or scraping purposes. One thing that is missing when using the driver via PowerShell is an easy way to specify an explicit wait for methods on the driver. This is useful if you would like to call a method on an element but don't know …

Group-Object “Wildcard characters are not allowed in …”

I recently came across a situation where I wanted to group a custom object based on a property that contained a question mark. Running the above resulted in the error message "group : Wildcard characters are not allowed in "test?".". To make Group-Object work with the property name that contains a wildcard character the property …

Hello world!

This is my very first attempt at blogging. I would like to use this space to collect and share hopefully useful bits and pieces around PowerShell, Excel and other topics. photo credit: Sad Tree via photopin (license)