Circumvent Web forms with auto-fill program

March 21, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

You’re surfing the Net at blazing speeds, gathering information, locating products and services, buying and selling — and all of a sudden it all comes to a screeching halt. You’ve just surfed into ... The Form Page Zone.

Within, you find those seemingly endless fill-in-the-form pages asking you to type in your first name, then your last name, then your address, then your ZIP code. And on it goes.

Pages that ask you to fill in repetitive personal data can ruin your online day.

Granted, modern browsers offer some kind of automation when it comes to filling in forms. But even the best of them only perform rudimentary fill-in-the-form processing. What you need is a utility that has been specifically designed to manage and process just about any kind of form the Internet can throw at you, including all of your passwords.

After you’ve created a few passwords, you tend to forget what they are unless you use the same one everywhere you go, which is really a very bad thing to do. And writing down your passwords can be just as risky.

One of the most popular fill-in-the-blank utilities is RoboForm. It will automatically fill in any form it comes across, typing the correct information within the proper field in any form page you access.

RoboForm remembers relevant data when you visit a Web site for the first time so when you visit it again, the data will automatically be filled in. And for many first-time accessed pages, RoboForm can still accurately determine much of what goes into which field based upon what each individual field is asking.

You can speed up online shopping, job searches, sweepstakes entries and the like. But what if you need to do all of this on someone else’s computer? Siber Systems, the publishers of RoboForm, has got you covered there with their RoboForm2Go.

Using an ordinary USB flash drive, all of your sensitive data, including passwords, are encrypted and stored within one of these devices. Normally, a flash drive plugs into an available USB port and acts like a small hard drive. But with RoboForm2Go, the flash drive acts more like a key. Just plug it into any computer’s USB port, and all of your RoboForm data is instantly transferred to that computer’s Internet browser.

So now when you surf to a form page, everything about you is instantly entered into the corresponding fields. This includes all of your personal information, including your name, credit-card numbers and passwords. It even stores all your bookmarks.

And when you are finished using that computer, all you do is remove the flash drive from the USB port. Once done, not a single item about you will remain on the computer. All of your personal data, passwords and identities are instantly removed, and surfing over to any forms page will leave it totally uncompleted.

RoboForm2Go gives you complete security, absolute portability and the very same automation that you’ll become used to when surfing on your own personal computer using RoboForm.

If having to fill in form pages makes you feel like an automaton doing the same things over and over again, then you’ll quickly discover how much better it is having automated form-filling utilities such as RoboForm and RoboForm2Go. Free 30-day unlimited trial versions are available for download. See the Web site for pricing information and site licenses.

Let your PC be the robot you never wanted to be.

For more information, visit www.RoboForm2Go.com.

Craig Crossman is a national newspaper columnist writing about computers and technology. For more information, visit his Web site at www.computeramerica.com.

2010 McClatchy Tribune