hi this is gary with macmost.com today let's look at autofill in safari [Music] macmost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than a thousand supporters go to macmost.com patreon there you could read more about the patreon campaign join us and get exclusive content and course discounts so when you arrive on a web page in safari and there's a form there you can type all the information manually but you can also use safari to auto fill a lot of information after all it doesn't make sense to keep retyping your name over and over again every time you visit a web page your mac should already know what your name is and be able to fill that in in a form asking for it but how that works exactly depends on your settings and autofill and understanding how to use it as an example let's take a simple form like this it's simply asking for the first name last name and email address now one of the things i could do here is if i click in this field here for first name notice how there's a little button over here to the right the icon looks like the icon you would see in the contacts app and you see if i look here i can select a contact and it would automatically fill that information in as you can see here it does more than fill in this first field it fills in all the fields where i can find a match with the information in that contact notice it also colors the background of those fields yellow so it indicates which fields it is filled in for you this makes it easier to see what it has done and also complete other fields that it hasn't filled in now another thing you can do is use the autofill shortcut if you look in the edit menu you can see autofill form and it's shift command a if i use shift command a here it fills everything in at confined now notice it chose a different email address so if i wanted something more specific it's better for me to select here and choose because my contact actually has two different email addresses one for home one for work and i can choose here easily and will fill in the rest of the form whereas just using the shortcut is going to pick one now where does it get that information from well if i go to the contacts app and i'm going to use spotlight to launch it and then i can look for my contact here you can see it's got the symbol next to it that same symbol we saw in the autofill pop-up this is my card if you don't see any symbol listed here in any of your contacts you can select a card and then you can go to card and then you can choose make this my card since it already is my card then that's grayed out but you want to have one card in your contacts that's you and has all of your information in it and select that as your card now this is where it gets the information from for autofill you can see there's my name and there are two email addresses one for work one for home so that's why it asked me that choice there because it needed an email address to fill in for that form and need to know which one i wanted to use if there's a problem with the information and filling out a form it's most likely here make sure that your name is correct make sure that it's all in the proper spot you know first name last name like that make sure your email addresses are in the right spots here and labeled properly and then some forms will even go further asking you for things like your address so you can make sure that's good as well with each field filled in correctly now in safari if you go to safari preferences and then select auto fill you'll have four check boxes here make sure that using information from my contacts is turned on else it won't look at your card in contacts for autofill information there's an edit button here that'll take you right to your card if you want but you can also get information from other sources as well so we're going to look at these two in a minute here but there's also other forms other forms will use variations that you manually type in and you can get a list of them here there's nothing there right now but let's say i go here and i fill this in with something different i fill it in like this and let's say i submit that form now if i look in safari preferences autofill and i edit other forms you can see this website is listed there i can remove it if i want but now that i've entered manual information in here if i use the autofill form shortcut it fills that information in however instead if i use this the contact here then i can still fill in my own information but that won't change the saved information i have for the site it's still going to remember that information for autofill so shift command a is still going to fill that in but i could go ahead and change this manually and submit and now autofill will recognize the changes that i've made now what about passwords if you go into preferences autofill and you have usernames and passwords checked you can click edit here and that's just going to take you to the same place that clicking here will take you and this shows you a list of all of your saved passwords and this is what will be used here so if i click in this field you can see i can select from here a password the one it thinks i should be using on this site due to previous experience or i can click other passwords authenticate and select one from here so let me select this one from another site and we'll fill that in if i've never entered anything for this at all i can do so right now and i'll remember it so i'm going to use a fake email address and a fake password and submit it and it's going to ask me if i want to save that password i'll say yes so now when i go here it's going to still show me this one from before because it's one i've used before but it says other passwords and now you can see it expands the list and it shows me the new one as well so i'll say yeah i want to use this one and it will fill that one in and if i go to safari preferences passwords authenticate and i search i can find these two right here and i can change them now what about credit card information here i've got a form it's asking for name email address and credit card information so if i click in here and do the regular autofill i can fill this in it's only going to fill those in so for credit card information it's going to give me a different list here and i could click here to fill this in if i go into preferences again credit card just checked if i go to edit it's going to ask me to authenticate and i can see the credit card information here i can select it remove i can add a new credit card and all that notice it never seems to fill in the security code for you it's usually a three or four digit number that's easy to remember and it's a little bit of extra safety that it's only filling in that tough parts and then it gives you this that you have to know on your own also notice if you go to fill in your email address you can select one of these if i select that notice it doesn't fill in these fields here it's only doing the email address in addition notice that if you're using hide my email part of icloud plus then you can do that right here create a unique email address but i'm sure the question you're asking is why does it sometimes not work well it depends on a number of factors the biggest factor is the website itself so here i have a form and i can see here this is first name last name and email address however there's code on this page that's labeling each of these fields this is a sample form i created so i carefully named this field first name this field last name and this field email but there would be nothing to prevent me from labeling this first field field 1 or field 22 or this field xyz and in that case there would be no way for autofill to know what goes there it's totally up to the website developers and designers to name these properly so that autofill works in some cases they don't it's frustrating but safari really is at the mercy of how the web page is coded and you can see how well it works here with my very simply coded web pages but then it fails a lot of times with very complex web pages sometimes those pages are built by developers who are building on top of libraries of other code and any problem that might happen with a certain version of safari or all browsers or anything maybe deep down there and not easy for them to fix in some cases they intentionally block autofill sometimes they do it through a misguided idea of what's better security other times it might be for some odd legal reasons who knows but they could put code on the page or misname these purposely or tag these fields in a certain way so that autofill just doesn't work for them and in that case may not be able to use autofill at all or it may only work for some fields and not for others it could be really frustrating now in other cases you may find that some of these fields are already filled in when you load the page what's going on there usually is the website is remembering some information in cookies for instance so that it automatically fills in those form fields so it's got nothing to do with autofill it's coding on the webpage combined with cookies since we have autofill it really doesn't matter but the websites kind of do that anyway to be more convenient so while autofill is convenient most of the time when it works sometimes it's not there and we have to enter the information in manually hope you found this useful thanks for watching [Music] if you like this video click the thumbs up button below to let me know i publish new tutorials each weekday hit the subscribe button so you don't miss out you