Forum Discussion
How to unprotect Excel sheet if forgot the password
RuthDelbert For Excel 2007 and later versions, files are saved in an XML-based format. This means you can unzip the file and manually edit the XML files to remove the protection. This method requires some technical knowledge and careful handling of XML files.
How to unprotect Excel sheet without password by editing the internal xml file:
- Change the file extension of the Excel workbook from .xlsx to .zip.
- Extract the contents of the ZIP file to a folder.
- Navigate to the folder and open the xl subfolder.
- Locate the worksheets subfolder and find the XML file corresponding to the protected sheet (e.g., sheet1.xml).
- Open the XML file in a text editor (e.g., Notepad++).
- Search for the tag <sheetProtection> and delete it along with its attributes.
- Save the XML file and close the text editor.
- Compress the folder back into a ZIP file.
- Change the file extension from .zip back to .xlsx.
- Open the modified Excel file, and the sheet should be unprotected.
This might solve a huge problem for me so thank you.
How do I know how much of the .xml file is <sheetProtection> and all its arguments?
I've tried deleting different lengths of code but it results in a corrupt file.
Thanks
The <sheetProtection> argument end on a <something...something.../> Delete up to the "/>".
thank you, these steps are very helpful! I’m encountering a different problem trying with a password protected workbook. Is this because of excel version? When opening the renamed .xlsx as a .zip file, the folders in zip do not have “xl”. The ones there are only
[6]DataSpaces
And then two txt files
EncrytedPackage
EncrytionInfo
the subfolders from [6]DataSpaces have
DataSpaceInfo
TransformInfo
No folders or files have “xl” or “sheet protection “.
What else should be tried? Thank you in advance for the advice and help!
