When troubleshooting issues, the Event Viewer is one of the most handy of all tools. Assuming that appropriate coding practices were used during application development, the Event Viewer contains a log of most problems – in the system, in the configuration or in the application code.

The only problem is analyzing the Event Viewer logs when you have a thousand events. It becomes extremely difficult to try and answer questions like the following while going through events serially:

1. Events logged by type for each source
2. Events by severity
3. Events by category
4. And many more such analytical questions…

These analytical requirements are best achieved with tools like Microsoft Excel. And so, I went about analyzing Event Viewer logs in Microsoft Excel in just 2 steps.

Step #1: Export the Event Viewer Logs to XML

1. Once the Event Viewer is launched, navigate to the Event Log to be evaluated
2. Right-click on the Event Log and choose “Save All Events As” option
3. In the Save As dialog, choose to save the Events as an XML file
   • If asked to save display information, you can choose not to store any or choose a language of your choice

And that’s it – it completes the 1st step!

Step #2: Import the XML file into Excel

1. Launch Microsoft Excel
2. In the File -> Open dialog, choose to search files of “XML” type
3. Select the exported Event Viewer Log file
4. In the Import Options, you can choose to import as an “XML Table”
   • Excel will prompt to create/determine the XML schema automatically. It’s okay to allow Excel to do so

And that’s it – the Event Viewer Logs are now in Excel and you can use all native Excel capabilities (sort, filter, pivot and so on).

I do hope you found this tip helpful. If you have more such thoughts and ideas, drop in a line in the Comments section below.

Until we meet next time,

Be courteous. Drive responsibly.