For leader-following networked systems with the topology switching and the aperiodic silence, limited-energy output formation tracking problems are investigated. Firstly, a new output formation tracking control protocol is proposed, which contains two components associated with the communication interactions between the leader and tracking intelligent agents and the communication interactions among tracking intelligent agents, respectively, and the aperiodic silence, the topology switching and the energy constraint index is introduced properly. Then, a two-step transformation method is presented to separate the whole dynamics of a networked system into the relative dynamics between the leader and tracking intelligent agents and the dynamics of the leader, and sufficient conditions for limited-energy output formation tracking for networked systems with limited energy and aperiodic silence are presented, which are extended into networked systems without the aperiodic silence. Especially, a partition checking algorithm is presented to check limited-energy output formation tracking design criteria. Finally, a numerical example is illustrated to demonstrate the validness of theoretical results.