How to Unlock Password Protected Excel File without Password

In the Internet information age, people are more sensitive to information security, but also very important. So, in order to prevent Excel documents are not authorized to view or modify, many Excel users are accustomed to encrypt Excel documents, such as document viewing password or read-only password, worksheet and workbook protection, etc., But it is inevitable that the password will be forgotten over time, at this time, Excel worksheets can not open, edit and modify. At this point, you have to unlock Excel password. The following is a list of several commonly used methods to unlock Excel password for your reference.

First of all, we need to clarify a premise, different types of Excel passwords, cracking methods are not the same, some passwords may not be unlocked; and Excel documents are divided into different versions (xls and xlsx), cracking methods are also different.

What’s the Chance of Unlocking an Excel Password?

Before moving on to how to unlock password protected Excel documents, we will first introduce you to the general concept of password unlocking and the success rate of password unlocking.

One of the most common methods of unlocking passwords is a brute-force attack. This type of method uses the computing power of the computer to keep guessing possible passwords until the correct one is found. So what are the chances of a password unlocking an Excel file? To be honest, there is no program on the market that can guarantee a 100% success rate. But a good Excel password unlocking tool can reduce the password unlocking time, therefore, the chances of password unlocking will be higher.

For those who are tech-savvy, we recommend trying an Excel password unlocker tool to open your password protected Excel spreadsheet.

Unlock Excel Passowrd using WinRAR

In office 2010, so we can extract the contents of the code inside by changing its suffix to .rar and modifying it. If the .xls file is from before version 07, we just need to use office 2010 version or above to open this Excel table and save it as an .xlsx file, and then try this steps below.

• Step 1. First we need to rename the encrypted Excel file, changing the .xlsx suffix, to RAR.

If you can’t see the suffix name on your computer how to do it?

• Step 2. At this point we just open [My PC] – [Folder Options] – [View],  then uncheck the option  [Hide extensions of known file types],  the suffixes of all the files are now displayed.

• Step 3.  Change the workbook suffix to rar format, and the table will become a compressed package. Double-click to open the .rar file directly.

• Step 4. we find the [xl] folder, i.e. the 3rd folder in the picture above, open it and find the worksheets folder, then click on it, you will  see several sheet names.

Step 5. At this point confirm which worksheet you have set the password to protect and then double click to open it. In my case, the worksheet we set the password is sheet1, so we open sheet1 and you can see a lot of characters.

Step 6. Then, you will see a lot of characters, do not care about it, we just need to press Ctrl + F to find the content: Protect, and then select the content of the two symbols containing protect <> (containing the two symbols) between the content, then click "Delete" button  to delete all code, as shown in the screenshot below.

Step 5. After the deletion, close the document, which will prompt us whether we need to update, we choose [Yes].

Step 6. After the update is complete, close the package, and then change the file extension from .RAR format back to .xlsx format, then we open the workbook again, this time it can be edited normally.

Unlock Password Protected Excel Password using DR.Excel

Dr.Excel is a very powerful tool for unlocking encrypted Excel documents, using the most advanced password algorithms and recovery technology, which can unlock complex Excel passwords in the shortest possible time. The software offers brute force attacks, dictionary attacks, word attacks, mask cracking, combination cracking and many other cracking methods to crack your Excel document passwords to the maximum extent. Also, to further increase the speed of password recovery, multiple CPU/GPU processor cores can be run simultaneously, this GPU accelerated mode can increase the speed by 10 times.

Function 1: Recover open passwords from Excel

Step 1: Install Dr. Excel on your Windows or Mac computer and run it to enter the main interface of the program.

Step 2: Select the recovery mode, or if you have forgotten your Excel open password, select the first mode "Recover Excel Open Password". Then click on the "Add" button to import your encrypted Excel file.

Step 3. Then select the type of attack you want from the list. There are 3 types of attacks to choose from. Here we recommend that you choose Mask Attack, which can find your password in no time as long as you can provide information about it, such as length, the range of characters, prefixes and suffixes, etc.

Step 4. Once set up, click the "Start" button to start searching for your password. Please be patient, the time required to unlock your password will vary depending on the complexity of your password and the performance of your computer. Once the password has been found, it will be displayed on the screen, copy and open the password protected Excel file.

In my tests, Dr.Excel took only 50 minutes to find my 7-digit length password, but mainly I remembered part of it and then used Mask Attack mode.

Function 2: Remove worksheet/workbook passwords from Excel

If you can only view the contents of Excel but cannot edit and modify it, this means that your Excel file is protected using Worksheet Protection. Dr. Excel gives you the option to remove this security from your Excel file so that you can work with your Excel without any restrictions.

Step 1. Click on "Remove workbook, worksheet password"in the main window and then click "Add File" to import your locked file into program.

Step 3. You need to specify a location path for your new Excel file, once you have done this, click the ‘Start’ button in the bottom right hand corner.

Unlock Password Protected Excel Password using VBA

With the above method, we need to find the password-protected worksheet, and then remove the contents of this worksheet password, If there is only one worksheet that is okay to operate. But if there are more than one worksheet in a workbook, then we need to go one by one to unlock Excel password, which is too inefficient and time-consuming.

So is there a better way?

This time it is necessary to use VBA, a simple two-step process to unlock the password protection of all worksheets. For the early xls documents (2003 and before), the use of VBA code to unlock Excel password success rate is 100%.

• Step 1. Click  [Development Tools] – [Visual Basic] in the menu bar, the following interface will pop up.
• Step 2.  Then click  [Insert] – [Module] in the VBA edit box, and then enter the following code in the inserted module.

VBA code: 

Sub PasswordRecovery()
Dim i As Integer, j As Integer, k As Integer
Dim l As Integer, m As Integer, n As Integer
Dim i1 As Integer, i2 As Integer, i3 As Integer
Dim i4 As Integer, i5 As Integer, i6 As Integer
On Error Resume Next
For i = 65 To 66: For j = 65 To 66: For k = 65 To 66
For l = 65 To 66: For m = 65 To 66: For i1 = 65 To 66
For i2 = 65 To 66: For i3 = 65 To 66: For i4 = 65 To 66
For i5 = 65 To 66: For i6 = 65 To 66: For n = 32 To 126
ActiveSheet.Unprotect Chr(i) & Chr(j) & Chr(k) & _
Chr(l) & Chr(m) & Chr(i1) & Chr(i2) & Chr(i3) & _
Chr(i4) & Chr(i5) & Chr(i6) & Chr(n)
If ActiveSheet.ProtectContents = False Then
MsgBox "One usable password is " & Chr(i) & Chr(j) & _
Chr(k) & Chr(l) & Chr(m) & Chr(i1) & Chr(i2) & _
Chr(i3) & Chr(i4) & Chr(i5) & Chr(i6) & Chr(n)
Exit Sub
End If
Next: Next: Next: Next: Next: Next
Next: Next: Next: Next: Next: Next
End Sub

• Step 3.  Then click the green triangle symbol on the menu – Run button, or press F5 to execute the code to start cracking. During cracking, you will be prompted twice with a dialog box, select "Confirm" for both. After the password cracking is complete, a prompt will appear "The worksheet password protection in this workbook has been removed", which means that the worksheet or workbook protection password has been successfully removed. Finally, delete the code in the "This Workbook" node and save the worksheet. At this point, the crack is complete.