Excel's Protect Sheet and Protect Workbook, Word's Restrict Editing and PowerPoint's password to modify all stop a file being changed, but none of them encrypts it. The protection is a setting stored inside the file next to the content, with the password kept only as a check. This tool finds every one of those settings in the file, lists them, and saves a copy without the ones you tick. Because the setting is removed rather than the password worked out, it does not matter how long or complicated the password was, and it takes a moment rather than hours.
Only the protection settings change. Cells, formulas, formatting, charts, comments, macros and everything else in the file are copied across as they are. If the file also has an open password, the kind that encrypts it, the tool asks for that password and saves a copy without it; it cannot open such a file without the password, and never tries to guess one. The files are read and rewritten in your browser and never uploaded. It is free to use, with no account and no upload limit, and it runs entirely in your browser: nothing is uploaded, and while the page stays open, a feature you have already used keeps working offline.
- How can it remove the protection without knowing the password?
- Sheet and workbook protection does not encrypt anything. Excel stores a setting saying the sheet is protected, together with a scrambled form of the password to check against when someone types one. Excel itself honours the setting, but the cells are stored as normal. Take the setting out and Excel has nothing to ask for. The same goes for Word's Restrict Editing and the password to modify in all three programs.
- Can it remove the password that is needed to open the file?
- Only if you know it. A file with an open password is encrypted, and the password is the key, so there is no setting to remove. Type the password and the tool decrypts the file in your browser and saves a copy without it, so you are not asked for it again. That works for .xlsx, .docx and .pptx from Office 2007 onwards and for .xls from Excel 97 to 2003. It does not guess or recover open passwords.
- Is this allowed?
- It is meant for files you own or have the right to edit: a workbook you protected yourself and lost the password to, or one handed down by a colleague who has left. Editing protection is a guard against accidental changes, not a security feature, which is why removing it takes no cracking. If a file belongs to someone else, ask them.
- Will anything else in the file change?
- No. The tool takes out the protection settings and copies everything else across: values, formulas, formatting, charts, pictures, comments, defined names and macros. Hidden sheets stay hidden: once the workbook structure is unlocked, unhide them in Excel by right-clicking a sheet tab and choosing Unhide.
- Which files does it work with?
- Excel .xlsx, .xlsm, .xltx and .xls (Excel 97 to 2003); Word .docx, .docm and .dotx; PowerPoint .pptx, .pptm and .potx; and LibreOffice or OpenOffice .ods and .odt. Excel binary workbooks (.xlsb), old Word .doc files and old PowerPoint .ppt files are not handled yet: save them in the newer format first. A password on a workbook's VBA macro project is a separate lock, and is left as it is.
- Why does my old .xls open without a password, when it is protected?
- When the structure of an .xls workbook is protected, Excel encrypts the file with a built-in password, "VelvetSweatshop", and opens it without asking. The tool does the same, so these workbooks are unprotected without a password too. The copy it saves is not encrypted.
- Are the file and any password kept private?
- No. It is read and rewritten by your browser on your computer, and so is any password you type. Nothing is kept once you close the page.