"Copy and Paste" entire form .

.. is there a semi-easy way?

[old_expat]

By way of explanation, a friend has a business that uses one specific form (not his) numerous times each day; and that form must be completed online.

It is a very long form, (3-4 screens high). And he needs to complete these during peak business hours.

If he could "pre fill-in" a form, then somehow copy and paste to the online form, it would save tons of time.

I tried looking at keystroke macros (record/playback) programs but ran into 2 problems.

The ones that incorporate a "mouse" function won't work because the form doesn't fit into 1 window; and when the window is scrolled vertically, the referewnce is off.

The commercial ones that let you try a demo are either very limited (like 300 characters limit), or won't let you save the macro (duh!).

I would appreciate any reasonable recommendations.

[Staffa]

I've sent you a sticky

[old_expat]

Thanks staffa .. replied to sticky. Not quite what we need.

[dragonthoughts]

Firefox has a memory of what is filled out on forms and the Google Toolbar is supposed to have a form remembering facility, although I haven't tried it.

Would either of these help?

[moltar]

Roboform is designed to save password forms, but can save any kind of forms. There is a free version available. Best piece of software I've ever bought as a webmaster hat.

[old_expat]

I probably should have anticipated this .. sorry.

The problem with most of the "form help" scripts is they are designed for filling the same information repeatedly.

In this case, the form information is 90% different every time. The reason for wanting the "copy and paste" is because the form must be completed online and there is a workload bottleneck issue. Each form takes 10-15 minutes to complete with maybe 1 minute of processing by the site being submitted to. This operation is often continuous for several hours each day.

If numerous staff were filling in "dummy" forms, they could be "saved", while one person could "copy and past", select a few pulldowns and radio buttons, then submit in perhaps 2-3 minutes.

[jomaxx]

FWIW, most if not all of the "mouse" functions in filling out a form can be replaced by keyboard commands. I don't even see why scrolling should be required if you are simply tabbing from field to field. The browser scrolls automatically.

It may help a lot to have a pre-program to massage the data slightly. For example converting the dropdown selection into a certain number of down arrows, and a similar sort of thing with tickboxes and radio buttons.

[old_expat]

Hi jomax,

"FWIW, most if not all of the "mouse" functions in filling out a form can be replaced by keyboard commands. I don't even see why scrolling should be required if you are simply tabbing from field to field. The browser scrolls automatically."

The reason I brought that up is because the only keyboard macro I could find to download and try had a mouse function that made it very squirrely on a long form. And if the mouse feature could be disabled, I couldn't find it.

There are about 20 locations on the form that use select pull-downs and radio buttons, but they are pretty fast, so if just the text boxes could be recorded it would still spped up the process considerably.