Unprotect Excel Sheet Without Password
How to Unprotect Excel Worksheet Without a Password: Excel password protection is meant to prevent other users from changing cells that are not supposed to be changed. Password protection also prevents movement of data or deleting of important data in your worksheet. However worksheet protection is not a security feature.
It does not prevent people from accessing your data since Excel uses a very simple encryption algorithm for worksheet protection. In some cases you may want to unprotect your worksheet. These cases may be in the event that you have forgotten your password.
If the worksheet author leaves your office or company, you will have to access their worksheet hence need to unprotect. The only way to do this is by cracking the password. You can unprotect the worksheet easily once you know the password. The following steps illustrate the ways of unprotecting Excel sheet without password
Unprotecting Excel sheet with Visual Basic for Application (VBA) code
For Excel 2010 or older versions you can unprotect sheet by pressing Alt + F11 to go to Visual Basic Editor. Then right click the workbook name at the left pane (project-VBAProject pane). Then select Insert then Module at the context menu. After that press F5 or the Run button on the toolbar. After some minutes the macro will report a cracked password.
The reported password is not the original but it works. For later versions of Excel there are security changes that have enabled protection against hacking. For modern versions of Excel you can use Password Protection Remover add-in for Excel. The free ribbon VBA add-in remover can remove password-protection from worksheets of Office 2007 and later versions.
By clicking on the Analyze Files tab select one or multiple files. Click the file icon to view the files protection status. Then select the Unprotect the Workbook tab then choose All Sheets or Single Sheet tab.
Unprotecting Excel sheet by copying the protected sheet contents to another worksheet
This is a workaround type of unlocking password protected Excel sheet. This is done by copying the entire contents of protected sheet to a new sheet. Start by opening the password-protected sheet.
Then position your cursor in cell A1, and press Shift + Ctrl + End. After this selects all used cells in the worksheet. After that press Ctrl + C to copy your selected cells. Then create a new sheet in your current worksheet or in another worksheet.
This helps create new Excel files, by just pressing Ctrl + N. after that go to the new worksheet and place your cursor in A1. Then Press Ctrl + V to paste those contents from the sheet that is password-protected. The process of copying protected sheet contents works on if the Select Locked Cell and the Select Unlocked Cells actions are allowed form the password-protected sheet.
Also the process requires that you re-create external links to other sheets in cases where the password-protected sheets has external links to other sheets. To avoid the hustles of adjusting column widths in the new sheets, you can use Paste Special in copy pasting.