Excel passwords

[elwarzio]

I forgot (dumb me) the password for opening an excel file, nothing to important, but a lot of wasted time to redo from scratch, there are a lot of programs that claim to hack the passes but anyone has any idea if it can really be done? It's an excel2003 file with reading password.

Thanks in advance

[randlemarcus]

yes, it can. google and try one of the shareware jobs

[docevi1]

they generally do it by brute force methods and that can take a very, very long time.

Do you usually set strong passwords (i.e. change in case, letters, symbols etc) or do you just use a word? If the later get yourself something which works from dictionaries as it'll be significantly quicker.

[luca brazzi]

I'll have a go (tools) if you email it to me.

LB

[Jay-Aim]

If it's a reading password, do you mean you can open the file in read only mode?

[neil_cardiff]

You'll find that Office 2003 and XP used a much stronger encryption thingumebob which mean't cracking them is MUCH harder than it was in 2k.

You may struggle

Quick question though, if it is an important file, why don't you use XP's encryption functionality?

Or if you are on a domain or using XP Pro in the right way, use the security rights and permissions to restrict access to the file.

I have a big problem where I am with users password protecting files, as inevitably they forget the password, and there is nothing I can do to help them. But if they use the security available to them they can restrict who can get to the files...

Plus as I remember, sometime password protected files are a blob as sometimes they can't be backed up (the backup software at times cannot 'open' the file) but I may be wrong - could never remember if this was true or not.

[loaf]

neil_cardiff said:

Plus as I remember, sometime password protected files are a blob as sometimes they can't be backed up (the backup software at times cannot 'open' the file) but I may be wrong - could never remember if this was true or not.

Depends on the backup software - Windows Backup on NT4 couldn't back up passworded files out-of-the-box - not sure if this was fixed in a service pack - but it was so sh!te no-one with any sense used it anyway. NetBackup backed them up OK from v3.2 onwards, and I think Arcserve did as well.