Powershell not storing foreach loop info in Variable - powershell

Question

I am trying to collect a list of the viewers installed on a set of servers. I am trying to loop through that list and run a wmi query and store the results and export a table with with the wmi result and server name next to it.
I am running this on server 2012
$computers = Get-Content C:\computers.txt
$WMIQuery = foreach ($computer in $computers){Get-WmiObject -Class
Win32_Product | where-object {$_.name -match "Microsoft Viewer*"}}
$WMIQuery
$WMIQuery | Out-File c:\Viewers.txt
Desired Results
Server Name Object1 Object2
Server1 Microsoft Excel Viewer Microsoft Visio Viewer
I output the file and get a blank txt file.

Answer 1

foreach ($computer in (Get-Content -Path "C:\computers.txt")) {
Get-WMIObject -ComputerName $computer -Class Win32_Product |
Where-Object {$_.name -match "Microsoft Viewer" } |
Out-File -Append -Path "C:\viewers.txt"
}
Your original code wasn't identifying the computer to perform Get-WMIObject against, so it was looking at only the computer that you were running the script on.
If there are many products on the remote computer, you may want to consider filtering on the remote computer instead of locally, so as to avoid transferring large amounts of data over what may be a slower-than-ideal network:
foreach ($computer in (Get-Content -Path "C:\computers.txt")) {
Get-WMIObject -ComputerName $computer -Class Win32_Product -Filter "Name LIKE '*Microsoft Viewer*'"|
Out-File -Append -Path "C:\viewers.txt"
}
(I think I have the filter syntax correct; I seem to have to hack at it every time I write a new filter...)

Answer 2

I don't have enough rep to add a comment, but Jeff is correct. However, there are still issues with the original poster's query. The following piece of code will yield no results based on the examples provided by the poster:
{$_.name -match "Microsoft Viewer*"}
That needs to either be changed to
{$_.name -like "*Microsoft*Viewer*"}
or
{$_.name -match "Microsoft.*?Viewer"}