How to remove a password from an Excel file: several simple methods

Situations when users, creating documents in the form of spreadsheets, protect them with a password, are found quite often. This is necessary to ensure that the formulas are not modified or simply not visible. Many begin to wonder how to remove the password from an Excel file or remove protection. Here are a few simple methods that allow you to perform such operations in just a few minutes.

How to remove protection from an Excel file, knowing the password?

First, let's look at the usual situation, when a sheet or a group of sheets is protected, but the user knows the password in order to be able to change the content.

The algorithm for deletion of protection is as follows. First, you should use the main panel, which selects the review section and then proceeds to the de-protection line. To confirm the action, you will be prompted to enter a valid password, after which the sheet or file becomes available for editing.

With this, everything is simple. But how then to remove the password from the Excel file , if the user who wants to make changes to the file does not know the required combination or does not remember? Here you can use several methods.

How to remove the 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 you select a line of information about it.

After that, the security protection button on the book is pressed, and then the password encryption point is used. In the appeared window, the previously set combination will be displayed. How to remove a password from an Excel file? Yes, just delete all the characters from the password line and re-save the document. When you re-open the book, the password request will no longer appear.

Using the file format change

There is another no less effective way to solve the problem of how to remove the password from an Excel file. It's about changing the format of the source document.

First, open the file to be saved directly in the program, selecting 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 there you should find the password tag (usually it looks like a password), then delete the content and just click save the document (for You can use Ctrl + S to quickly save the file.

But in the presence of a large number of sheets, this method may not work, so initially you should re-save the document in XLSX format, then open it with 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 sheets in XML format (Sheet1, Sheet2, etc.) will be contained. After this, for each such object, you should repeat the editing operation in the text application. Only first the search for the sheetProtection tag is set, and then everything that is between the combinations "" is deleted. After this, you should follow standard save, then you will need to drag the saved files into the archiver window and agree to the replacement of the contents. At the end of all these actions, you can save the files in the native format in the spreadsheet editor.

Third-Party Programs

Finally, the question of how to remove the password from an Excel file can be solved using special script programs like Password Remover.

After installation, the application integrates its own commands into office applications (not only in Excel, but in all others). To delete a password, the first start with the built-in VBA script first needs to agree with the execution of the macro, then open the file, and in the main editor panel, use the Straxx command. Here you need to understand that the cracker application is not and does not work on the principle of random selection of the desired combination. It disables file protection from within, so it's easy and safe to use. Feedback from users who used this script in practice, indicate that the entire process of deprotecting takes about two minutes.