PowerShell: How to Remove Column from CSV File

Often you may want to use PowerShell to remove a column from an existing CSV file.

Fortunately this is easy to do by using the following syntax:

Import-Csv $my_file |
Select-Object * -ExcludeProperty points |
Export-Csv new_data.csv -NoTypeInformation

This particular example will remove the column named points from the existing CSV file located at the path specified by the $my_file variable and save the results to a new CSV file named nba_data.csv.

The following example shows how to use this syntax in practice.

Related: How to Add Column to CSV File Using PowerShell

Example: How to Remove Column from CSV File Using PowerShell

Suppose we have a CSV file saved in the following location:

• c:\users\bobbi\nba_data.csv

We can use the Get-Content cmdlet to view the contents of this file:

We can see that the file currently has three columns: team, points, and assists.

Suppose that we would like to remove the column named points from the file.

We can use the following syntax to do so:

$my_file = "c:\users\bobbi\nba_data.csv"

Import-Csv $my_file |
Select-Object * -ExcludeProperty points |
Export-Csv nba_data2.csv -NoTypeInformation

The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:

We can see that the points column has been removed from the file.

Also note that we could list multiple column names separated by commas following -ExcludeProperty to remove multiple columns.

For example, we can use the following syntax to remove both the points and assists columns from the CSV file:

$my_file = "c:\users\bobbi\nba_data.csv"

Import-Csv $my_file |
Select-Object * -ExcludeProperty points, assists |
Export-Csv nba_data2.csv -NoTypeInformation

The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:

We can see that both the points and assists columns have been removed.

Note: When using Export-Csv we included -NoTypeInformation to remove the #TYPE information that would otherwise appear in the header of the CSV file.

Related Tutorials

The following tutorials explain how to perform other common tasks in PowerShell:

PowerShell: How to Use Export-Csv with No Headers
PowerShell: How to Use Export-Csv with No Quotes
PowerShell: How to Delete All Files with Specific Extension