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Ryan McCormick

Dedicated Dad, Software Engineer and Lover of Coffee

Crack Microsoft Excel Password Free | Excel 2007, 2010, 2013

March 5, 2014 by Ryan McCormick 29 Comments

It is always annoying when forgetting passwords. It is also annoying when you inherit a document from a previous employee and it is protected by a password only they knew. But your boss asked for you to get the data from that spreadsheet and change some things and Right now! What are you going to do?

Well the good news is that if the document isn’t encrypted, this process is pretty straightforward. You will be up and running in no time! AND you don’t have to spend $40 on some software you will use only once.

If you need to crack a Word Document as well, check out my Crack Microsoft Word Password Free post.

Crack Microsoft Excel Password Instructions

These instructions cover the process of breaking edit/read only protection on Microsoft Excel workbooks and worksheets. This WILL NOT work on Excel files that have been encrypted.

Disclaimer:
There can be a number of reasons for breaking password protection on an Excel file. Before we start, please note that I take zero responsibility for the results of these instructions. You are the master of your own actions and by proceeding, you take full responsibility of your own actions.

Step 1: Make a Backup of Your File

You will be making changes to the internal structure of your document. It is good practice to create backups before starting.

Step 2: Check your file format

This will only work on Excel files that are 2007, 2010, 2013 and have “.xlsx, .xlsm” formats. If your document is in an older format “.xls” from Excel 2003 or older, open in Excel 2007, 2010, or 2013 and save as an “.xlsx file”. If your excel file has macros, save as an “.xlsm” file to enable macros.

Step 3: Disassemble your Document

Because the .xlsx file format is based on a tree structure with XML files, it is easy to disassemble. For this example, I protected both the individual worksheet and workbook on my sample excel file. We will break this protection by changing some settings in the file.

For the disassembly process, the main file compression utility in windows will work just fine. For the first part of this demo, I am using WinRAR (Free to download). If you can’t install WinRAR, please scroll down to see the alternate disassembly process using the Windows built-in file compression tool.

Disassembly with WinRAR:

  1. Open WinRAR and click the File menu.
  2. Select Open archive.
  3. Set the file type at the bottom from “all archives” to “all files”.
  4. Locate your Excel file and click “Open”

Step 4: Remove Password Protection

The root view of the excel file structure:

Excel Archive File Tree

The files you are going to edit are in the xl folder that is circled in red.

For Workbook(whole excel file) Settings:
xl>workbook.xml

For Individual Worksheet File Settings:
xl>worksheets>sheet1.xml [sheet2.xml] – etc…

Make your Changes

Browse to xl>workbook.xml and double click on the file. If you are prompted to select an application, always select NOTEPAD – NOT WORDPAD!

If you are unfamiliar with XML, this might look strange. Find the line that looks like:

<workbookprotection workbookalgorithmname="SHA-512" workbookhashvalue="/PqWjbsJjvF9ZfuAX/9rSOHijK4Q==" workbooksaltvalue="BNztIxbaEJpw7IvcclH28g==" workbookspincount="100000" lockstructure="1">
</workbookprotection>

Change lockStructure=”1″ to lockStructure=”0″
Save and Close the XML file you just edited

WinRAR will tell you that “workbook.xml” was modified and ask you to update it in the archive. Select YES.
notifier

Browse to xl>worksheets>sheet1.xml(or sheet2, sheet3, etc…) and double click on the file.

Delete the whole line that looks like:

<sheetprotection algorithmname="SHA-512" hashvalue="p10u4BneUg3eT/wBlxTIvojOqTuf18kg==" saltvalue="pOCHLgXP+8NSbHK89LmgGQ==" spincount="100000" sheet="1" objects="1" scenarios="1">
</sheetprotection>

Save and Close the XML file you just edited

When prompted to update the archive with the file you just modified, select YES.

Close out of WinRAR and Open your file.

NOTE: If you are using Excel 2010, the following buttons may need to be clicked on to “unstick” them:

protect-excel-document

Once unstuck, you should now be able to edit the document as you please.

Alternate Disassembly Instructions – Windows Archive Tool

By default, file extensions are hidden for common document types. You will need to change your folder settings to show file extensions.

Here are some instructions that should cover Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/show-hide-file-name-extensions#show-hide-file-name-extensions=windows-vista

Once you can see the file extension of your Excel Document file, change the file extension from .xlsx, .xlsm to .zip โ€“ after the change, you will get a warning that you are changing the extension. Click OK or YES to accept.

Now that your file is in a .zip format, right-click on your file and select Open With>Windows Explorer

extract

Click “Extract all Files”, select your file destination and click “Extract”

Remove Excel File Password Protection

Refer to Step 4 above for changes
Make your changes, save your files and move to the next step

Alternate Instructions for Reassembly

  1. Select all your files (_rels,docProps,xl,[Content_Types].xml, etc…), right-click and select: Send to>Compressed (zipped) folder. If you create your archive by selecting your main folder and not all of the files, you may run into errors when re-opening.
  2. Change the file extension of your archive back to the original – .xlsx, .xlsm. When prompted to confirm changing the file extension, select yes.
  3. You should be able to open your fixed excel file. NOTE: your new filename will be whatever file you right-clicked on to create the archive. Feel free to change it back.

Please comment if you get stuck. Likewise if you have other questions or improvements.

Related

Filed Under: Windows Tips Tagged With: 2010, 2013, Remove Password Excel 2007

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. meeta says

    April 13, 2014 at 11:19 pm

    nice post

    Reply
  2. Rafael Santos says

    May 26, 2014 at 3:05 pm

    This Works!!!! Thanks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    Reply
  3. CYT says

    June 9, 2014 at 7:18 pm

    you are awesome! ๐Ÿ˜€

    Reply
  4. Adam Pj says

    January 5, 2015 at 3:30 am

    Well done, fantastic article. Worked for me and saved for future reference ๐Ÿ™‚

    Reply
  5. Alex Araujo says

    December 2, 2015 at 5:36 pm

    Dear Ryan thanks for this post. Worked fine for me. Best Regards

    Reply
  6. Anonymous says

    December 5, 2015 at 12:56 am

    This is awesome… Works fine, I can’t even believe… Thanks buddy!!! THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

    Reply
  7. Kalichopko says

    December 30, 2015 at 4:53 am

    Thank you, Ryan! You saved me a lot of work! Amazing.

    Reply
  8. O says

    February 19, 2016 at 5:56 am

    That is amazing! Spent ages using Macros to do a brute force attack, but it never worked. Found this solution which is so easy.

    Well done good Sir

    Reply
  9. Josรฉ says

    February 20, 2016 at 9:00 pm

    Thanks a lot!!… very useful article.

    Reply
  10. Minh says

    March 4, 2016 at 12:55 am

    tks so much for your post

    Reply
  11. Kevin says

    June 9, 2016 at 9:58 am

    It worked to unprotect the individual sheets, but the workbook.XML password protection character string was not in the word pad file. The other string was which allowed me to unlock the sheets, but it didn’t unlock the VB side. Is there something I am missing? I looked in all of the other files and didn’t find any other password XML code, but I may just be missing something.

    Thank you for your help!

    Reply
  12. Nick says

    June 20, 2016 at 11:34 pm

    Work like a charm…Thanks!

    Reply
  13. Brett says

    August 4, 2016 at 4:14 pm

    Amazing, thank you so much. Saved me a ton of time

    Reply
  14. gaurav says

    August 8, 2016 at 8:21 am

    didn’t worked for me can you help me?

    Reply
  15. hyunjoo says

    September 29, 2016 at 1:00 am

    ใ…œใ…œ
    step3…..open archive….but error massage

    D:star.xlsx
    The archive is either in unknown format or damaged

    help me

    Reply
  16. Jason says

    February 4, 2017 at 1:16 pm

    I confirm that it also works in Excel 2017! Many thank for the post.

    They use SHA-512 to encrypt the password, and then it is so easy to unprotect the sheets etc,!

    Reply
  17. Hector says

    March 9, 2017 at 3:59 pm

    Was scouring through blogs and youtube for hours before I got here. Worked great!! You’re a lifesaver!

    Reply
  18. archana says

    March 22, 2017 at 12:18 pm

    This was awesome! Thanks a ton!

    Reply
  19. Will says

    June 1, 2017 at 8:15 am

    So simple and it worked. Thanks!

    Reply
  20. Rodrigo says

    November 2, 2017 at 10:57 am

    Thanks . mil gracias funciono

    Reply
  21. keehoon says

    November 6, 2017 at 6:40 pm

    Hi morning, can anyone help me to unlock a file ?? i have forgotten my password i cant recall back .. pls help me .. URGENT !!!

    Reply
  22. Irshad says

    November 16, 2017 at 5:49 pm

    I cant use it for excel 2010 , cant find lockStructure=”1″/>.in the end i got “10000” after that i cant find lockStructure=”1″/> help me please

    Reply
  23. deneme12Cem says

    December 4, 2017 at 2:37 pm

    Thanks! It worked :))))

    Reply
  24. I V RAMANA MURTHY says

    December 28, 2017 at 12:10 am

    This is NOT working for me. Please suggest any other free method.

    Reply
  25. Peter S says

    April 7, 2018 at 9:02 am

    I have a workbook with proctection on sheet level and 80 sheets in the book. How to determine the right filename sheetnn.xml of the sheet at which I want to remove the protection? The workbook.xml contains a mapping of sheet name to sheetId. In my case the shhetId of the sheet I am looking for is 128. But the sheetnn.xml file names run from sheet1.xml to sheet80.xml.

    Reply
    • Peter S says

      April 7, 2018 at 2:26 pm

      I found the answer: workbook.xml does contain the mapping of the sheet name to the number being part of the sheet’s filename sheetnn.xml (or sheetn.xml for numbers up to 9).

      Look for something like

      and take that value nn.

      For example, in my case it is r:id=”rId39″, so sheet39.xml is the sheet’s XML file.

      Reply
  26. ANZALA says

    April 20, 2018 at 9:30 am

    you really help me, thank you very much ๐Ÿ™‚

    Reply
  27. Juliana says

    May 7, 2018 at 7:58 am

    The only way I could unhide a protected worksheet (where I forgot the password….)
    Thanks!!

    Reply
  28. Richard says

    July 16, 2018 at 1:07 pm

    Thank you!! It saved me a lot of work.

    Reply

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