Make Your Life Simpler

In the next several pages, I tell you about tags, favorites, searches, collections, and other tools that you could use to manage your 1Password data. But you don’t have to use any of them, and most people—even power users—will merely waste time and effort in the care and feeding of information that can take care of itself.

I have about 2,000 items in my copy of 1Password (including more than 1,000 logins), accumulated over 16 years. I don’t use tags or favorites—a simple search virtually always turns up exactly what I’m looking for. I choose not to make extra work for myself.

So, before you do any organizing at all, try using 1Password for a while by merely searching (see Perform a Search) for what you need. If you find that searching isn’t cutting it for you, then start using the other tools—slowly. Don’t overdo it just because you can.

Nevertheless, even if you take no action now, you should be aware of what 1Password can do—especially how it sorts and displays your data—so you’re never confused about where something may be.

Understand the Sidebar Sections

The sidebar (Figure 25) lets you filter the display of your stored items in the main list. Click a header (denoted by a tiny arrow to its left) to expand or collapse it. Click a non-header item in the sidebar, and only the matching items appear in the list.

In addition, you can filter your item list to show just a particular category by clicking the All Categories pop-up menu above the item list and then choosing a category. 1Password in Your Browser takes this concept even further: it has no sidebar at all, but the pop-up menu above the item list lets you display most of the sidebar sections I discuss here as well as filter by category.

Here’s what you’ll find in the sidebar:

• All Accounts, an account name, or a collection: This pop-up menu at the top lets you filter the display to show items from all accounts you’re currently signed in to, only a particular account, or any collection (a group of one or more vaults; see Use Collections). It also offers commands to manage collections and accounts, among other things.

• All Items: Click here to see all items, from all categories, except those in the Archive.

• Suggestions: In 1Password in Your Browser (only), the Suggestions option shows items likely to be of use to you in your current location.

• Favorites: You can manually mark your most important 1Password items (of any sort) with a star to designate them as favorites. See Use Favorites.

• Watchtower: Click Watchtower to display a dashboard that helps you identify logins that may be insecure or in need of changing for one reason or another. I cover all these in detail later, in Perform a Password Security Audit.

• Categories: For each type of item you’ve stored in 1Password (such as logins, secure notes, credit cards, and standalone passwords) you’ll see the corresponding category in the sidebar or the pop-up menu above the item list. 1Password shows several common categories by default, even if you don’t have any items yet, but less-used categories (such as Memberships and Outdoor Licenses) appear only after you add items in those categories.

  You can’t add your own categories, rename or reorder categories, or change which category an item belongs to. That’s because each category corresponds to one of 1Password’s built-in templates; they’re not merely arbitrary labels. (That’s what tags are for, as I explain in a moment.)

• Tags: Tags are words or phrases you create to describe items that share some characteristic (see Use Tags, ahead in this chapter). An item may have multiple tags (such as Work, Important, and Marketing), and tags can be nested inside one another.

• Archive: This item was formerly called Trash. Just as in the macOS Finder’s Trash or the Windows Explorer Recycle Bin, the Archive holds items you think you’re done with until you’re sure you’ll never need them again. Read Use the Archive, later in this chapter, for details.

Use Favorites

If you have a few 1Password items that you use frequently and want to be able to find as quickly as possible, you can mark them as favorites. This feature identifies important items with a star and displays them in the Favorites category, which appears at the top of your sidebar and in a prominent spot in 1Password in Your Browser as well as 1Password for iOS/iPadOS and Android.

To mark an item as a favorite, select it in the main 1Password app or in 1Password in Your Browser. Click the “More options” pop-up menu and choose Add to Favorites; repeat the procedure but choose Remove from Favorites to remove it from your favorites list.

There’s nothing more to say about favorites, but I’ll give you one piece of advice: use this feature sparingly. If you have more than a handful of favorites, they’ll get lost in the list, defeating the purpose. If you need to identify a larger number of frequently used items, tags are a better choice.

Use Tags

Tags let you identify items that share certain characteristics, but they don’t impose a rigid structure—a tag can contain one or more words; an item can have multiple tags at once; and tags may be nested (to create “families” of related tags) if you like.

To make a new tag, select an item and click Edit. Click “+ Add tag” at the bottom and type a word or phrase, followed by Tab, Return, or a comma. (To indicate nested tags, type a slash—for instance, Personal/Health means a Health tag will be created underneath a Personal tag.) Then click Save. Newly created tags appear under the Tags heading in the sidebar.

When you begin typing a tag’s name, 1Password displays any matching tags in a pop-up list; select a tag with the arrow keys or pointer to apply it to the item. Alternatively, you can apply a tag by dragging any item in your list to a tag in the sidebar.

You can also tag a newly created or updated item from the Save dialog—type the tag(s) in the tags field before clicking Save or Update.

To delete or rename a tag, right-click (or Control-click) the tag in the sidebar and choose either Delete Tag or Rename Tag from the contextual menu. Deleting a tag removes it from all items that used it. Tags can’t be reordered in the sidebar; they’re always in alphabetical order.

Adjust the Sort Order

To change the order in which items appear in the main list, click the unlabeled sort icon above the item list and choose your desired sort criterion and order from the pop-up menu.

Perform a Search

Most of the time, you can find any item in 1Password by typing a few letters of the item you’re seeking in the search field. Matching results are displayed instantly. However, the details of searching vary depending on which 1Password component you’re using.

Use Previously Generated Passwords

Merely generating a password in 1Password doesn’t necessarily save it. (That can be a pretty big problem if you use your freshly created password on a website or elsewhere but then have no record of what it was!) If you generate the password using the 1Password in Your Browser extension, then yes, 1Password keeps a record of it even if you don’t explicitly save it. But if you use the 1Password app, it actually stores a generated password only when you click Save. Depending on the circumstances, then, you may be able to find a previously generated password after the fact…even if you didn’t name it properly, or if you’ve changed a password since initially saving it.

You can find previously generated passwords in these places:

• 1Password in Your Browser: In your browser, click the 1Password icon on the toolbar, click Settings > Password Generator, and then click Password Generator History at the bottom. You can scroll through (or search) the list of passwords generated by 1Password in Your Browser, which are listed by date (in reverse-chronological order) along with the website on which they were created.

• Passwords category: This category, found both in the 1Password app and in 1Password in Your Browser, lists every standalone (non-login) password that you’ve saved in 1Password. Each password appears as a separate (and editable) item. If you’re unable to find a saved password by its name or website, you can try sorting by date, which is especially useful for finding recently created passwords. To do this, open the 1Password app, select Passwords in the sidebar, click the unlabeled sort icon above the item list, and choose Date Created (or Date Modified). Remember that you can also use this menu to show Newest First or Oldest First.

• Password History: If you save a login item (or other item that includes a password, such as an email account), and later change its password in 1Password (see Update Old Passwords), you can view the passwords previously used for that login. To do this, select the item in the 1Password app, hover over the password, click the unlabeled pop-up menu on the right, and choose View Password History. (This capability does not currently exist in 1Password in Your Browser.)

• 1Password.com: If you sign in to your account at 1password.com, 1password.ca, or 1password.eu, you can locate and select an item for which a password was changed, and then click View Item History to display a list of previously saved states. Click View to see the contents of any previous version of the item, and click Restore to restore an older version.

Use the Archive

If you want to delete something from 1Password, you can (as I explain in a moment), but you probably shouldn’t! No matter how careful you are, you might accidentally delete something you later need, and when that item is a password you didn’t store anywhere else, that can be more than a little inconvenient. Therefore, rather than deleting items outright, I suggest moving them (at least temporarily) to 1Password’s Archive, where they’ll be out of the way—they won’t appear in item lists, autofill suggestions, or searches—but available for retrieval later if need be.

To archive an item, do any of the following:

• 1Password app: Right-click (or Control-click) the item and choose Archive from the contextual menu. Or drag the item to the Archive icon in the sidebar.

• 1Password in Your Browser: Select the item, click the “More options” pop-up menu, and choose Archive.

If you discover that you’ve archived something you want to retrieve, no problem: just select it in the Archive list, right-click or Control-click, and choose Restore Item.

And what if you really do want to delete an item rather than archive it? Or you want to permanently delete something in your Archive? Follow the steps above, but click Delete instead of Archive. After a warning, the item will disappear forever.

Work with Multiple Vaults

1Password accounts include support for multiple vaults. Although most users should find a single vault adequate for their needs, some people may want to compartmentalize their data. For example, you might want to have separate home and work vaults, a vault for each client you work with, or vaults that contain different sets of credentials to share with different people. Users of family or business accounts automatically get both a personal vault and at least one shared vault. You can also create collections of one or more vaults, potentially across accounts, for more granular access to what items are available at any given time. And, those who travel internationally may want to segregate certain information into a travel-safe vault; see Use Travel Mode.