Using a generated password

When you invoke the Strong Password Generator (typically through the browser extension while you’re looking at a site’s “new account” or “change your password” page) you can copy the new password to the clipboard long enough to fill in the form. You may be able to log in to that initial session, but what about later?

Even if you created a Login for that page, many sites don’t use the same page for regular logins, so your saved Login item might not work for the regular login page. The new strong password probably isn’t on the clipboard, any more, either. How will you remember that unguessable password?

First, there’s a Fill Last Generated Password button in the 1Password dialog box. If you need it soon enough, that’s the easiest way to go. What if you log in to the site right away, though, and then don’t come back for a while? You might have generated several other strong passwords in the meantime. Now what do you do?

The good news is that 1Password stored the new password in the Generated Password vault. In addition to the password itself, these Generated Password items include the URL of the page you were visiting and the name of the item (typically “Password for website-name”). You can’t use them directly to log in to a site, but you can use them to recover your strong password, and you can use that on the site’s login page, where you’ll create a new Login, as described in Saving a Login item.

If you don’t see the Generated Password vault in the upper left quadrant of the 1Password window, just choose View > Generated Passwords (1); then select the vault (2). In the list of items, select the item you saved (3), and click the Copy link (4), as shown here.