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

1. Open Eventviewer (%windir%\system32\eventvwr.msc)
2. Navigate to: Event Viewer (Local) > Custom Views > Administrative Events
3. In the “Actions” pane select “Filter Current Custom View”.
4. Select the the XML tab.
5. Press Ctrl+A to select all the XML code of the Custom View.
6. 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

1. 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.
2. In Windows Search, type “ISE” (without the quotes) to open “Windows PowerShell ISE” and Run as administrator
   
3. 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

4. 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
5. 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. :)

Now to the more technical hard stuff...

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.

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:

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

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!

Hi @gsnyder

I don't know why you can't download it, it works fine from my end, but in any case the script contained in the file is the following:

Code:

$FileDate=Get-Date -format "yyyyMMdd.HHmm"
$EventsPath="$env:USERPROFILE\Desktop"
cd $EventsPath
Get-WinEvent -FilterXml ([xml](Get-Content "AdmEvtView.xml")) | export-csv "$FileDate.csv" -UseCulture –NoTypeInformation
<# Alternatively, to get the columns in the order shown in EventViewer run the following command:
Get-WinEvent -FilterXml ([xml](Get-Content "AdmEvtView.xml")) | Select-Object Level, LevelDisplayName, TimeCreated, 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
#> 
Write-Host "The file $FileDate.csv was created."
Exit

Copy the above code and save it in a txt file. Then rename the file to ExportEvtCSV.ps1, open PowerShell as Admin and run it.