Lifehacker: The Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, and Better, Third Edition

Hack 54: Automatically Fill in Repetitive Web Forms

Level Medium

Platform All Platforms

Cost Free

As a citizen of the web, you frequently enter repetitive information about yourself into forms. Every time you sign up for a new website with your email address or username, enter in your shipping address, or type in your credit card information for purchases, you waste precious time typing out the same information. Manually typing this information every time is also error prone, which is why sites often ask you, for example, to retype your email address — which takes even more of your time.

You could use text expansion tools to speed up this process, as discussed in Hacks 52, “Reduce Repetitive Typing with Texter for Windows,” and 53, “Reduce Repetitive Typing with TextExpander for Mac,” but you still have to tab through the form to fill out each field, and with sensitive data — such as your credit card number — those utilities’ plain-text storage won’t cut the security mustard.

This hack details how to automatically and securely fill in repetitive web forms with the free browser plug-in LastPass (http://lastpass.com/).

NOTE For more on how to use LastPass to securely track and fill in your website logins, see Hack 15, “Securely Track Your Passwords.”

LastPass stores the information you give to it in an encrypted state and uses one master password to access that database. (Read more about LastPass’ security at https://lastpass.com/whylastpass_technology.php.) It’s most commonly ...