Excel Password Recovery - Works Every Time

Work on a Copy, and Only on Your Own File

Every method on this page is for a file that is yours, or a file you are formally authorised to open — for example your employer's file with written permission. Removing or guessing the password of someone else's file without permission is not a favour: it can be a crime, and at work it can be a sackable offence.

Work Out Which Lock Is on the File

Excel can lock a file in two fundamentally different ways. Protection passwords guard a sheet, the workbook structure, or a VBA project: the file opens, you can read every value, but Excel refuses to let you edit the protected parts. A file-open password is set under File, Info, Protect Workbook, Encrypt with Password, or at save time — that one encrypts the entire file, so a password box appears before a single cell is visible.

Telling them apart takes five seconds. If the file opens and only editing is blocked, you have the protection lock: follow Steps 3 to 5. If a password is demanded before anything is visible, you have the encryption lock: go straight to Step 6.

Open the Copy as a ZIP and Find the Sheet XML

A modern .xlsx file is not a solid block of data; it is a ZIP container holding XML documents, one per sheet, plus shared parts. Sheet protection is never encryption — it is a note stored inside that XML, which is why it can be removed. Change the copy's extension from .xlsx to .zip, then open it with Windows Explorer or a tool like 7-Zip.

Go into the folder xl, then worksheets. Each sheet is a file like sheet1.xml. If your problem is workbook structure protection instead — sheets cannot be added, deleted or renamed — the equivalent element lives in xl/workbook.xml, and the same routine applies to that file.

Delete the sheetProtection Element

Open the protected sheet's XML in a plain text editor such as Notepad. Find the element that starts with <sheetProtection and delete the whole element, from its opening bracket to its closing />. It looks like this — the hash values inside differ in every file:

<sheetProtection algorithmName="SHA-512" hashValue="..." saltValue="..." spinCount="100000" sheet="1" objects="1" scenarios="1"/>

That one element is the whole lock: it holds the protection settings and the password hash Excel checks when you click Unprotect Sheet. Your rows, values and formulas live in a separate part of the same XML and are not touched by deleting it. For workbook structure protection, delete the workbookProtection element in xl/workbook.xml the same way. Save the XML and change nothing else — use a plain editor, because one that reformats the XML or changes its encoding can break the file.

Rebuild the File and Verify Everything

Put the edited XML back into the ZIP in exactly the same place, then change the extension back to .xlsx. Open the file in Excel: the sheet is now unprotected. Check the values and a few formulas before you trust the copy, and keep the original untouched as your fallback.

If the File Is Encrypted: The Honest Route

If Excel demands a password before the file opens, none of the steps above can help. A modern .xlsx with an open password uses genuine AES encryption: the password is not stored anywhere in the file — there is only a verifier that lets Excel check a password you type — so there is nothing to extract, delete or reveal. Renaming an encrypted file to .zip proves it: you will find no readable worksheets inside at all. That ZIP test is itself the quickest way to confirm which lock you have.

First, look for another door. You may have emailed an unprotected version, saved a copy before adding the password, or kept the file in a cloud drive whose version history still holds the pre-password version. A colleague may have the password in a handover note. A found copy ends the problem in minutes, with certainty — which guessing never offers.

If no copy exists, the only route is guessing, on your own PC and on a copy of the file. Dictionary guessing tries words and the variations humans always make — capital first letter, a year at the end, 123 after a word. Mask guessing fixes the parts you remember, like the length, a starting word and trailing digits, and varies only the rest. Brute force tries every combination and is the last resort. Length decides the odds: a short or simple password falls; eight characters mixing letters and digits is slow, serious work; ten or more genuinely random characters will not fall in any realistic time. Feed the tool everything you remember — a partly remembered password is dramatically easier than a total blank — and decide a stopping point in advance. Past it, the honest verdict is that the data must be rebuilt from other records.