I'm still working on wrapping my head around how I can incorporate this cmdlet into my scripts. I wrote the following but the first line that gathers all the info takes as long as the entire rest of the function. Is it possible to improve this ie move the information gathering into the progress??

Function Get-InstalledApps(){
$Installed_Apps = Get-CimInstance -ClassName Win32_Product | Select-Object -Property Name,Version,InstallDate,InstallSource

For($i = 1; $i -le $Installed_Apps.count; $i  )
{ Write-Progress -Activity "Gathering Installed Apps" -status "Found App $i" `
-percentComplete ($i / $Installed_Apps.count*100)}
$Installed_Apps | Select name,version}