I have an excel workbook with protected sheets that were protected by a former employee who did not leave us any of the passwords. I used VB to determine the sheet number, changed the file extension to .zip, extracted the sheet's xml, opened the xml with notepad++, and searched for sheetProtection. It is not in there. I searched for just protection and algorithm but they are not int there either. I also tried open with just notepad, same results. I checked the other 3 protected sheets in the workbook, none of them have sheetProtection either. In the workbook, all the sheets say the workbook protection is off, but I checked the workbook xml for workbookProtection anyway. It is not there.
There are macros in the workbook for other worksheets within the workbook. I was able to copy those worksheets from another workbook into this one.
Is there some other place the passwords would be hidden or some other property? Is there some other way to remove/learn the worksheet passwords?
