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.
not working, it produce an error insteadToddSumrall
If Unsupported Format error see my solution above.
Hi I also had this issue with an error - I found the best way was to follow the Zip file process but instead of deleting the sheet protection code was to replace it with a code of a spreadsheet you know the password - or just generate a dummy spreadsheet with a password protection password and use that code
