How to Export Active Directory (AD) users fast and easy

Sometimes we need to export all of our AD users. The one time for applying changes, sometimes for monitoring the inventory but often for licensing purposes.

At this page I will show you how to export all your AD users fast and easy.

Table of Contents

• The Export AD users script:
• How to export the AD users by hand
• Summary
  • Sources

The Export AD users script:

For the fast pass, I uploaded the script to my Github page:

How to export the AD users by hand

To export the users without using a script, navigate to your Active Directory management server and open up Powershell. We will do all the action the script above does, but then by hand and type in every command separately.

Type in the first command to ensure the correct module is loaded:

Import-Module ActiveDirectory

Import-Module ActiveDirectory

Then we can execute the command to query all AD users:

$adusers = Get-ADUser -filter * -Properties UserPrincipalName,Mobile,Givenname,sn,name | select UserPrincipalName,Mobile,Givenname,sn,name

$adusers = Get-ADUser -filter * -Properties UserPrincipalName,Mobile,Givenname,sn,name | select UserPrincipalName,Mobile,Givenname,sn,name

This saves all the users in the $adusers variable. Now let’s print this list:

$adusers

$adusers

This shows all users in the PowerShell window itself, but we are able to export this to a CSV file:

$adusers | Export-Csv "C:\Users\$env:USERNAME\Desktop\AD_Export.csv" -NTI -Delimiter ";"

$adusers | Export-Csv "C:\Users\$env:USERNAME\Desktop\AD_Export.csv" -NTI -Delimiter ";"

This gives us a nice and “Excel-ready” export of all the AD users. It is also very clean, but you can add or remove extra attributes from Active Directory from the second command.

For a complete list of all the attributes that can be used, visit this Microsoft Learn article.

Summary

This page shows an easy way to export all your AD users in a great and readable way. It also has some possibilities for customization but it shows how to do it in the most simple way possible. I also included a automatic way and a manual/by hand way to learnexactly what happens.

Thank you for reading and I hope it was helpful.

Sources

These sources helped me by writing and research for this post;

1. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/activedirectory/get-aduser?view=windowsserver2025-ps#filter
2. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/learn/ps101/03-discovering-objects?view=powershell-7.5#active-directory

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