I forgot my word document password, can I recover it?

Let’s face it, the first method of opening the Word document in WordPad is like the lottery—it might work occasionally, but don’t count on it. A lot of the time, all you’ll end up with is a bunch of gibberish. If it does work, awesome! But if not, you’re back at square one, feeling frustrated.

Ah, the Hex Editor method. Sounds cool, right? But diving into a hex editor like HxD is a whole different beast. If you're not comfortable with tech stuff, you might just end up confusing yourself instead of recovering the password. It requires a decent understanding of what you’re looking for, and the risk of messing up your file is real. If you accidentally change something you shouldn't, you could totally corrupt the document and lose access forever.

Both options can be time suckers when you recover forgotten password from Microsoft Word. The WordPad method is hit-or-miss, so you could waste time trying that only to find out it didn’t work. The hex editing route requires patience and focus, not to mention the fact that you might end up scrolling through a lot of code that looks like a foreign language. If you’re in a hurry to get to your document, it’s super frustrating!