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.
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.
