How to remove, crack, or break a forgotten Excel xls password

Posted on November 20, 2007 at 12:30 pm

Make sure to read other posts from the Hack Passwords series!

How to remove, crack, or break a forgotten Excel xls password
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How to determine your router’s default password
Cell Phone Hacks - How to hack your cell phone (Samsung, LG, etc)

Have you forgotten your Excel password for a workbook or sheet? Or has someone left your office and they forgot to unlock an Excel workbook with a password set on it? If you’re stuck with an XLS file with a password that you need to break or crack, you can try out a small little utility that just might be able to get you back into your Excel file.

Remove Excel Passwords

Excel Password Remover 2007 is a freeware program that you can use to remove/crack/break/unlock a password on an Excel workbook or sheet. However, you still have to be able to open the file itself. If the file is protected in that you cannot even open the file without typing a password, I’ll mention another program that you can use to crack that Excel password.

However, for most Excel password protection, it’s usually on the workbook or sheet so that someone can view the file, but not make structural changes to the file or changes to the cells. If this is your case, download the add-in and double-click on it. Excel will open and you’ll be asked whether to enable or disable the macros associated with the add-in. Of course, enable it.

Then go ahead and open the Excel workbook that has the password on it that you would like to get rid of. There will be two new menu options under Tools, called Unprotect Sheet and Unprotect Workbook.

I created a test workbook and protected both the sheet and the workbook with a simple password at first. The program worked perfectly and it removed the protection very quickly!

However, I decided to see how well it worked with a fairly complex password set to the workbook! I used 9 character password that had a combination of uppercase, lowercase, numbers and a symbol to put the Excel password remover to the test and I was quite surprised that it actually managed to crack it after about 2 minutes! Not bad at all!!!

Note, however, that this program only works with Excel 2000, XP and 2003. Excel 2007 has much stronger encryption and this little tool would take centuries trying to crack that.

Remove Excel Protection and Remove VBA Passwords

Now if you’re trying to crack the password that is needed to open the Excel file itself, you will have to try out some other programs, which unfortunately are not free like the one above, however, there are your best chance at getting into that Excel file.

Excel Key recovers all types of passwords for Excel (xls) spreadsheet files including sheet, workbook, file open, etc. This program also works up to Excel 2007. You can download a demo of the program that will only display the first two characters of the password, however, this might be enough to jog some people’s memory! If you still can’t remember, you can buy it for $45.

If you need to crack an Excel VBA password, you should check out VBA Key from the same company. It supports all office products including Word, Excel, Access, etc for VBA password recovery. It also supports multilingual passwords. It also costs $45.

Any other Excel password recovery tool you use that you would want to mention? Post a comment! Enjoy!

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31 Responses to “How to remove, crack, or break a forgotten Excel xls password”

Madhur Kapoor said on : November 22nd, 2007 at 1:29 pm

Nice tool buddy. Can you recommned something similar for Microsoft Word 2007 files.

hello said on : December 5th, 2007 at 10:59 pm

How to remove or recover the excel file if it was attack by virus. so, any suggestion to….? or any program to ….?

Akert said on : December 20th, 2007 at 7:22 am

I love this it helped me out at work when someone made a worksheet and didn’t tell anybody the password befor they left so i made one myself.

Chuck L said on : December 20th, 2007 at 1:36 pm

I used it on an excel ‘03 workbook and it worked except for an error that reads “Compile error in hiddem module”. On further investigation there is a Visual Basic “xxx.xlt project that has password protection on it. Any suggestions?

sudipta kundu said on : December 23rd, 2007 at 6:15 am

how to recover xls file password

swathi said on : April 22nd, 2008 at 10:42 pm

how to remove the excel file password that is protected

dipalee said on : May 8th, 2008 at 5:15 am

how to open a file if I forgot the password

Steve said on : June 13th, 2008 at 2:21 pm

Don’t forget to try importing the Excel spreadsheet in Google docs, which will ignore any password protection.

Kreesh said on : July 1st, 2008 at 1:22 am

Hi,

Thanks you had give me what i had lost?
Thank you very much.

regards,
kreesh

Guess said on : July 7th, 2008 at 9:00 am

For word docs, just save the doc as a .rtf file. The save removes the password, you can then save it back to .doc.

Hanafi said on : July 8th, 2008 at 11:44 pm

How to remove password for open excel2007 workbooks ?

Shantele said on : July 9th, 2008 at 12:25 pm

I need help getting in to my protected excel sheet… it is protected and when I go to the unprotect it in the tools menu it is grey and not able to click on it to type in th epassword therefore not able to access it?? Help!! Any suggestions!!!
Thanks

Chris said on : July 17th, 2008 at 3:12 pm

didnt work on office 2003 - no option to unprotect workbook, only unprotect sheet- that still asks for a password

hire2hack.net said on : August 8th, 2008 at 2:29 pm

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santosh rane said on : August 15th, 2008 at 9:24 am

I have forgot my excel worksheet password, can any one help me too know or remove it ?

Regards
Santosh Rane

xulqar said on : August 18th, 2008 at 8:46 am

HI,
i have forgot my excel password. can you pls send me any software which can remove that password.
Thanx and Regards,
xulqar.

hire2hack.net said on : August 19th, 2008 at 5:27 am

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grr said on : August 28th, 2008 at 9:24 pm

how can i crack password in msaccess

Nicuala said on : October 28th, 2008 at 4:19 pm

I have forgot my excel worksheet password, can any one help me too know or remove it ?
I’m so lost and this file is so important, plus i’m on work so i can’t download any crack software. Can someone pleeeease help my job depends on this file

Regards
Nicuala

Mobashar said on : November 25th, 2008 at 12:24 am

I forgot my Excel file password and i want to know the method by which i could break the file password.

Kevin said on : December 8th, 2008 at 7:16 am

Hi there,

A guy that received his termination letter recently decided it would be fun to password protect a load of Excel files before he left. I know there are loads of sites with software to crack Excel password, but I cannot download any software that works. Does anyone have any ideas on how to resolve my problem?

JWL said on : January 2nd, 2009 at 6:15 pm

If you have another spreadsheet program such as Open Office or Quattro, you can simply read the spreadsheet in one of those programs and remove the cell protection. Neither asks for the password.

Printmaster said on : January 6th, 2009 at 10:44 am

BTW I don’t know why but this works on a G4 Mac running 10.4 in Office 2004. So any Mac users out there just drop in your Office/Startup/Excel. Launch Excel and enjoy.

Jim said on : January 26th, 2009 at 11:24 pm

Nice little app
cracked her in 31 seconds

cheers
Jim

subhrajit said on : January 30th, 2009 at 1:15 am

I forgot my Excel file password and i want to know the method by which i could break the file password.

gazoo said on : March 4th, 2009 at 4:11 am

You can also open the xls file in Open Office 2.4 to unprotect password protected cells. This was changed in Open Office 3.0.1, so use the earlier version. You basically need to replace the password byte sequence with the byte sequence for a blank password, which is what open office does. This can also be done with a hex editor. Excel 2007 is different however.

Seph said on : March 10th, 2009 at 1:52 pm

To remove word passwords (winword 2003) just open the file and invoke microsoft script editor, (under tools>macro, or alt + shift + f11) and search for the password tag (press ctrl+f and type password), there should be a tag named unprotect password, delete it’s content and save. Close and open the file, it will still be protected but the unprotect password will be blank. NOTE: The text between the unprotect tag is not the password, it’s probably encoded or encrypted. This worked 4 me, hope it helps….

Clare said on : March 25th, 2009 at 5:25 am

Thanks for the tool, saved my work collegues a lot of hassle after their happy password protecting antics.

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