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I'm providing internal support and one of our users has managed to put a password on an excel file by accident, I've done the proper checks to make sure that the user should have access to the document and now want to know what the recommendation for removing a password from an Excel document.

For what its worth, the password appears after Excel opens but before you can see any data in excel.

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Um, you're kinda stuffed. Unless you want to do complicated cryptography stuff... (I'm not aware of any programs for doing this on .xls). There's no normal, automated way of doing this in Excel - that would kind-of defeat the point of having a password in the first place... your only hope would be a special cipher cracking program for such files (which may be hard to find). Maybe Google decrypt xls or something similar. – samjetski Oct 21 '09 at 10:06
thank you, I'll try that but not much hope. – Ben Confino Oct 21 '09 at 11:41
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3 Answers

up vote 5 down vote

Elcomsoft make a pretty useful program called Advanced Office Password Recovery which can do the job better than anything else I've used.

It's probably worth putting a value on the data you're trying to recover before attempting this, sometimes it's less expensive to let the user re-create the document from scratch (and teaches them a valuable lesson ;-) ). AOPR isn't free, and the passwords can sometimes only be worked out by brute force (trying every possible combination of letters) which can take a very long time.

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Elmcomsoft's programs are good, I've had success with this in the past for opening an Excel file I was sent without the password. Get a decent wordlist, and try that first (the one included in Cain and Abel is a nice 3MB one). If that fails, give brute force a try, but if it's a strong password, you're never getting in. – Dentrasi Oct 21 '09 at 18:58
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up vote 1 down vote

Haven't been in such situation with Excel, but still ... this may help.

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up vote 0 down vote

Is something like this, the Excel Password Remover XLA add-in, what you are after?

EDIT: Thinking about it, maybe not - this is used for removing the password from protected worksheets/workbooks.

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whether ethically we can solve using this tool ? – joe Oct 21 '09 at 10:41
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bwahahahahahaha – Daddy Warbox May 29 '10 at 14:28
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