Note: This article was originally written in June 2015 and is now over 10 years old. Due to changes in Active Directory and PowerShell over time, the described solution may no longer work as written. Please consider this guide as a conceptual reference rather than a current implementation guide.

We were just having a discussion here at work about the most common given names in the organisation. I decided to put my PowerShell skills to good use, to give us a definitive list from AD.

Get-ADUser -filter * | Select-Object givenname,surname -Unique | ? {$_.GivenName -ne $null} | Group-Object -Property givenname | Sort-Object -Property count -Descending | Select-Object -property count,name -First 20

Note that I made some adjustments above to not display the grouping data which includes surnames. Piping the above to Out-GridView results in an easy-to-read listing:

[Image removed during migration: Screenshot showing a PowerShell Out-GridView window with a list of 20 given names and their counts sorted in descending order]

Modern Implementation (2025 Update)

For modern Active Directory environments, a more efficient and secure approach would be:

# Set parameters for better control and performance
$searchBase = "OU=Users,DC=contoso,DC=com" # Specify your AD container
$properties = @("GivenName")

# Use server-side filtering and specify only needed properties
Get-ADUser -Filter {GivenName -like "*"} -SearchBase $searchBase -Properties $properties |
    Where-Object {-not [string]::IsNullOrEmpty($_.GivenName)} |
    Group-Object -Property GivenName -NoElement |
    Sort-Object -Property Count -Descending |
    Select-Object -Property Count,Name -First 20 |
    Out-GridView -Title "Most Common Given Names"

This improved version addresses several potential issues with the original command:

  • Uses proper server-side filtering instead of retrieving all users
  • Retrieves only the necessary properties from AD
  • Includes a SearchBase parameter to limit the scope to relevant OUs
  • Properly handles null/empty values
  • Uses the -NoElement parameter with Group-Object for better memory efficiency
  • Significantly improves performance for large directories

Security Considerations

When running queries against Active Directory:

  • Always scope your query to only the necessary OUs using SearchBase
  • Consider privacy implications when displaying personally identifiable information
  • Ensure you have appropriate permissions to query user information
  • For production environments, consider anonymizing names or only showing aggregate counts above a certain threshold
  • Be mindful of domain controller performance impact when running queries against large directories

Remember to customize the SearchBase parameter to match your Active Directory structure.