Forum Discussion
How to unprotect Excel sheet if forgot the password
You don't need to change the file extension to zip or arj or whatever.
You can just right click the xlsx file and choose to open it with a ZIP editor.
I use and recommend 7-zip.
Thereafter, the procedure is the same as explained by EdwardGreen and ToddSumrall, i.e.:
- Find the directory called \xl\worksheets\ and spot the (first) XML file related to the sheet you want to unlock.
- Right-click the XML file and choose EDIT -> your text editor will open the XML file.
- Inside the XML file, find the "sheetProtection" tag and entirely delete it (i.e. from the "<" symbol just before "sheetProtection", to the nextcoming ">" symbol, both included).
- Save the XML file
- Close the XML file and when prompted, confirm you want to reload the modified xml file into the xlsx archive.
very nice, thank you!
This worked perfectly, and so easy! Thank you so so much!
Just want to drop a thankyou for this one. I knew how to do it like this but only by saving it as a zip etc. and going around the houses.
Good straight to the point tip with any easy explanation not often found on the internet.
Thanks.
Notepad++ is free and does the trick. I’ve used it plenty times as I always end up using an unrememberable password
If you have lots of sheets to unprotect, Notepad++ allows regular expression based search and replace, which is really useful. Open all your sheets at once with Notepad++, select Search and Replace, select the Regular Expression radio button for your search type and then use <sheetProtection.+?/> as your search term. This will find the section that you need to delete across all your sheets. Replace with blank and then hit "Replace all in all opened documents". You've got 'save all' and 'close all' buttons to commit your changes too. Final tip - don't click "Enable Content" when you open the spreadsheet in case the person who protected the sheet put in a sneaky macro to re-enable protection.
For older excel files ending with .xls this method does not work. A workaround that I found is that you can export them to .xlsx from excel and apply the above method that you mentioned.
how do you export if you can't open the file? could you share the detail steps?
That's if 7-zip or another tool are installed already.
Not necessarily - the ZIP editor can be a portable one.
This said, I thought it was quite obvious and implicit but.... yes, the expression "open it with a ZIP editor" means you clearly need to have a ZIP editor available (either installed or portable)... 🙂
