On the odd occasion that I need to use variables within Group Policy Preferences, I sometimes find myself wishing that there was a blog post that lists out exactly what the variables resolve to.

For example, does the %ProgramFilesDir% value include a trailing backslash? Or do I need to include one myself?

Sure, you can press F3 to bring up the list of variables, but it doesn’t provide example values:

I decided to use Group Policy Preferences itself to generate a list of the variables and their values. This was achieved through the INI file extension:

I’ve exported these preference items to XML, so you can import them into a fresh GPO and test for yourself. Get the files here.

I couldn’t get the User preferences extension to generate an INI file, and ran out of time to troubleshoot, but here’s all the variables pertaining to a Computer policy (I’ve obfuscated some values):

Apologies for the image-based table. WordPress.com doesn’t make inserting tables particularly easy.