Situations when users create documents in the form of spreadsheets and protect them with a password are quite common. This is necessary so that the formulas are not modified or are simply not visible. Many people begin to think about how to remove the password from the Excel file or remove the protection. The following are some of the simplest methods that allow you to perform such operations in just a couple of minutes.
How to remove protection from an Excel file, knowing the password?
To begin, consider the usual situation when protection is set on a sheet or group of sheets, but the user knows the password to be able to change the content.
The protection deletion algorithm is as follows. First, use the main panel, in which the review section is selected, followed by the transition to the unprotect line. To confirm the actions, you will be prompted to enter a valid password, after which the sheet or file will become editable.
With this, everything is simple. But how then to remove the password from the Excel file , if the user who needs to make changes to the file does not know the desired combination or does not remember? Here you can use several methods.
How to remove a password from an Excel file using the program?
The method of removing the password looks quite simple. To do this, in an open document, you need to use the file menu, where a string of information about it is selected.
After that, the button for setting protection on the book is pressed, and then the password encryption item is used. In the window that appears, the previously set combination will be shown. How to remove a password from an excel file? Yes, just delete all the characters from the password string and save the document again. When you open the book again, the password entry request will no longer appear.
Using File Format Change
There is another no less effective way to resolve the issue of how to remove a password from an Excel file. It is about changing the format of the original document.
First, the open file must be saved directly in the program, choosing XML as the format. The new document is then opened in the usual Notepad using the right-click menu and the "Open with ..." command, and already there you should find the password tag (usually it looks like Password), then delete the contents and just click on save the document (for quick save, you can use the combination Ctrl + S).
But if there are a large number of sheets, this method may not work, so you should initially save the document in XLSX format, then open it using any archiver (WinRAR, 7-Zip) and extract the contents to any convenient place.
Next, you need to find the Worksheets folder in the unpacked directories, where all the sheet files in XML format will be contained (Sheet1, Sheet2, etc.). After that, for each such object, you should repeat the editing operation in a text application. Only at first the search for the sheetProtection tag is set, and then everything that is between the combinations "<sheetprtotection" and = "" "=" "> is deleted. After that, standard saving follows, then you will need to drag the saved files into the archiver window and agree to replace the contents. At the end of all these actions, the files in the spreadsheet editor itself can be saved in the native format.
Third party programs
Finally, the question of how to remove the password from the Excel file can be resolved using special scripting programs like Password Remover.
After installation, the application integrates its own commands in office applications (not only in Excel, but also in all others). To remove the password, at the first start with the built-in VBA script, you first need to agree to the macro, then open the file, and use the Straxx command in the main editor panel. Here you need to understand that the application is not an attacker and does not work on the principle of random selection of the desired combination. It disables the file’s protection from the inside, so using it is simple and safe. Testimonials of users who have applied such a script in practice indicate that the entire process of removing protection takes about two minutes.