Tools to open a password protected excel file

[Chien9999]

Hi,

I have a password protected excel file & the password is forgotten. Do you have any tools to recover password ?

Also in case VBA project is protected, how to recover to view ?


Thank you very much.

[WorkHorse]

I don't know. I used to have some code that would recover Office 97 files--the encrytion was just an xor with a series of hex values. But I think more recent Office applications have more sophisticated encryptions.

I've never really spent the time to analyze Excel files to find where the password protection indicators and corresponding encrypted password data is stored in the file.

There are some decent commercial products available. It will probably be cheaper if you only need to open the file (or reset the password) and not actually recover the existing password.

I've used Advanced VBA Password Recovery Pro and Advanced Office XP Password Recovery with success. Hope this helps.

[Chien9999]

Thank you for your help.

In fact I have some Tools but It takes too long to recover.
I'll try to see if there's some others available here.

Cheers
Vu Nam Chien

[WorkHorse]

Sounds like your "tools" are doing brute force attack. Been there. Done that. I've searched the Internet. I've searched many forums. As I said I used to have code to break Access 97 passwords but from what I remember of the code it isn't even on the Internet anymore. MS must work to prevent such code going public. I've tried brute force attacks. I've tried analyzing files to hack the password. I've tried looking for freeware, shareware, demos. No one that sells a password hacker will give a complete demo because mosteveryone just needs to hack one password when they need it. The time you will spend trying to break the password for free will not be worth the cost of purchasing some software.

This is one of those cases where even though you are a programer it is best to pay for someone else's code. The products I mentioned above with find, replace, or dalete a password in a metter of seconds. The only way trying to work out how to hack the password is valuable is if you are trying to write and market your own password hacking program. Otherwise, someone else has done all the work and pays for it a little bit at a time by selling licenses. As a purchaser, you only pay a fraction for the time that it would take to do it yourself. Money well spent.

[WorkHorse]

Check out the products I already mentioned. On Google search for "Advanced Office XP Password Recovery" and "Advanced VBA Password Recovery". For a personal license, Office is $60 US and VBA if $30 US. Although I've never had the problem, some sites say that long passwords can take a long time to recover and offer services that guarntee password recovery to take care of the work for you. They charge about $40 US. I would try some decent commercial software first (they probably aren't using anything better themselves).

[Chien9999]

Thank you for your mentions.
I understand that it would be related to sercurity issue & copy right also, not only a single file for password recovery.

I'll try as you suggest.

Thanks again.

Vu Nam Chien