Forum Discussion
How to unprotect Excel sheet if forgot the password
I found this post from search engine and tried a couple of answers shared by others in this thread. However,
most of them were not working. Fortunately, I recovered the password successfully thanks to the reply made
by LindaHamilto.https://www.softfixnow.com/how-to-unprotect-excel-sheet
P.S. for strong open password, you have to wait sometime to finally retrieve the password and unprotect the
sheet afterwards.
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.
