Method 1、 Set password

In Word document, Excel workbook and PowerPoint presentation, both password to open and password to modify can be set. What’s more, there are various kinds of passwords can be set to protect workbook, structure, window, restrict access and etc. Set a strong password is the most secure way to protect Office document. Learn how to set them through other posts in this blog.

You must remember the password carefully; otherwise, you may need an Office password recovery tool to find the forgotten password.

Method 2、 Hide the content

Apart from the tips introduced in Hide and unhide columns, rows, and window in excel 2007, we can also hide Office document content in a more ingenious way.

Press Ctrl+A to select the whole content, change the font color to be white, since document background color by default is white (if not, change window color back through personalization in win 7) , people opening it will only see a blank document. To protect Office document safer, insert a picture and put it in front of text, thus peeper may not doubt its content according to file size.

Method 3、 Improve macro security

To prevent others running macro to recover worksheet password or harm Office document, you can set macro to a high security.

Step 1、 Click Office button and choose Word Options underside.

Step 2、 In Word Options window, select Trust Center tab in the left, and then click Trust Center seetings button in the right panel.

Step 3、 In Trust Center window, choose Macro Settings tab in the left, and then check Disable all macros without notification or Disable all macros with notification in the right panel. OK.

By default, Office disables all macros with notification.

Protect Office document by using above encryption and protection methods reasonably, your Office files will be secure certainly.

For Excel open password, no trick is available, you have to find a workable tool. On the internet, most Office or Excel password tools work to recover Excel password. Here is good news that, for Word and Excel 2003, you can adopt Office Password Breaker to remove or reset their passwords.

Steps:

1、 Download and register Office Password Breaker.

2、 Import Excel 2003 workbook, and click remove password. In second, a prompt “reset Excel password to 999” will come out. (In the process, make sure you have connected your computer to internet.)

3 、Find the copy of the Excel workbook in the same file folder, open it by password “999”, you would open it with success. Amazing! Isn’t it?

If the Excel is 2007 version, no tool can remove or reset password to blank at present, you have to recover Excel password.

Among various programs, Excel Password Unlocker would be your first choice. Why? Cost effective Excel Password Unlocker is designed to recover Excel 97/2003/2007 open passwords specially. And it develops advanced Multi-Core CPU acceleration technology to quicken Excel password recovery speed.

What’s more, it provides three attack modes: brute force attack, brute force with mask and dictionary attack.

• If you know nothing about the password, choose brute force attack.
• If you remember the password characteristic, such as length, uppercase, lowercase, numbers, symbols, prefix and suffix, set all these in Brute-force with Mask attacks. The more you set, the more cracking time will be saved.
• Dictionary attack is a password attack that does not attempt to decrypt any information, but tries each of the words in a dictionary in hopes that the user has used one of the words as his or her password. Besides, you can import your own dictionary or dictionary downloaded from internet to the program.

With Excel Password Unlocker, you may recover Excel password more easily and efficiently.

In business work, you may need to analyze data in a large Excel table with tens of columns and thousands of rows, such as an order report. When you just want to check certain columns, what to do with the columns between them? Hide them to make your work more convenient.

Hide columns: Right-click the first column and then select hide from the list.

To unhide column, usually you can select the two columns before and after the hidden one, and then right click to choose unhide. As the hidden one is the column A, you cannot select the column before it, but you can unhide it in this way:

Select the whole worksheet, go to Format in Cells group under Home tab, and choose unhide columns as above picture shows. All hidden columns will be shown.

The ways to hide and unhide rows are similar: Right-click the row and then select hide from the list. To unhide it, select the two rows above and below the hidden one, and then right click to choose unhide.

How could we know the columns and rows are hidden? That is easy, if the numbers of columns and rows are not sequential, then there must be hidden ones.

Hide window: Go to View tab, and click Hide button in window group. The whole Excel workbook will be hidden. Click the active Unhide button to cancel hidden.

Caution: Hide is not secure enough, do not use it to protect your Excel file.

Editing restrictions under “Restrict Formatting and Editing” in Microsoft Office Word can help you.

Step 1、 Click the Review on the Ribbon. In the Protect group, click the Protect Document button.
Step 2、 Choose the option “Restrict Formatting and Editing” from the Protect Document drop-down list.

Step 3 、In Editing restrictions part, check the box and choose Comments in the drop–down list.

Step 4、 Click “Yes, Start Enforcing Protection” button. You will be asked to input a password. Reenter it to confirm.
Important: Remember the password carefully; once you forget Word password of this kind, it is impossible to recover it.

Step 5、 Save the file, you will see that many buttons in the Ribbon are grey and unavailable, which means readers cannot change the format, and also cannot edit the content with the keyboard.

Note: Since its content can still be copied, make sure readers won’t leak it.

With above steps, you have successfully protected Word 2007 from being modified.

How to remove this protection?

To remove this password protection, Open “Restrict Formatting and Editing” again, click “stop protection” button below, and input the correct password. The “Restrict Formatting and Editing” panel has now removed all password restricted permissions. And then you will be able to edit the file again.

More tips:

If you cannot open a Word file without password, it must be encrypted with password to open. Use Word Password Unlocker to recover Word password.

Note: The password in this article refers to “password to open”.

Main point 1: In Office 2007, the security has improved dramatically compared to Office 2003.

To regain access to word/excel 2003, we can adopt Office password breaker to remove word password and reset excel password.

If it is an encrypted Office 2007 file, Office 2007 password recovery by corresponding software must be implemented, and no tricks can be used.

Main point 2: Usage of strong passwords is very important.

Office password recovery tool works to try all possible passwords in a range for Office 2007. Short and simple passwords can be cracked within seconds. To be on the safe side, we recommend a minimum password length of 10 characters.

Main point 3: Do not always encrypt Office document, you can protect it in another way- hide it.

When should you use password protection? If your Microsoft Office 2007 document contains sensitive data, make sure that you encrypt Office file when you:

• Store the file in a shared location or folder.
• send the file by email (without using email encryption)
• Store the file on a workstation that you share with other people.

Without encryption, Office 2007 password recovery will not bother you.

Main point 4: No Office password recovery software guarantees 100% successful rate for Office 2007.

Unless the password is very short, can be guessed or consists of a simple dictionary word, you have to try a brute-force attack. When brute-forcing, the time to crack the password depends on the amount of possible passwords that the cracker has to try. The amount of possible passwords increases with password length and password complexity. The result is that Office 2007 password recovery will cost a great amount of time, ranging from several months to many years, even the most optimized password breaker.

Password recovery vendors do not have an easy solution for Office 2007 password decryption and do not guarantee success.

If you know nothing about the password, you should have the expectations that you will get nothing after days of cracking.

Disable password setting

You are able to password protect Word, Excel, and PowerPoint from several Office versions by setting the “password to open”. You may know that, it is quite times-costing or even impossible to successfully complete Office password recovery to get the Office password.

Since a forgotten password might result in the loss of critical business information, you may wonder if it is possible to prevent Office file from being encrypted. Yes, you are able to disable setting new passwords in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, using the DisablePasswordUI setting in registry (Note: This method is tested in Office 2007 and 2010).

Step 1、 Go to the below location.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER \Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Common\Security

Step 2、 In the right pane, right click on the blank area, New->DWORD(32-bit) Value to create a new value.

Step 3、 Rename the value as DisablePasswordUI and double click the name to set value data as 1. 1 means Office cannot be encrypted, 0 is on the contrary.

After finishing settings, you will see that the option of Encrypt Document under Prepare is gray and unavailable. Without setting password, you will avoid the trouble of Office password recovery.

Enable password complexity

If you must usually password protect Office document, enable password complexity would be quite efficient for you.

Attention: It is said that password complexity cannot be enforced for Microsoft 2007 Office system encryption.

If you are using Office 2010, please do the following steps:

Step 1、 Go to the below location.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Common\Security\PasswordComplexity

Step 2、 Create a DWORD(32-bit) value named PolicyLevel , and set value data from 0,1,2, and 3.

0 is for no complexity (default), 1 for minimum length, 2 for minimum length plus requiring 3  from 4 character groups (lowercase a-z, uppercase A-Z, digits 0-9, or non-alphabetic character) , and 3 for all these checks plus at least 6 characters.

Do the same steps to create a DWORD(32-bit) value named MinLength, and then set a number of minimum length. It is suggested to fill the box with 6.

From then on, when you set a password, the system will verify whether it fits password complexity.

Important: Remember your password carefully, thus you will never be bothered by Office password recovery.

Condition 1: The encrypted Word file is downloaded or received from internet or others.

For Word document downloaded from internet, sometimes we can find the password in readme text in the compressed file folder or the download page. If you cannot find any information about that, you’d better take up Word password recovery instead. Since you know nothing about the password, you could adopt Brute-force Attack, which will try all possible passwords, thus days, months or even longer time are required. Judge the value of Word document, and decide whether to recover word password or not.

Certainly, if the Word file is sent by others you can contact, asking them for the password will be the easiest way.

Condition 2: The Word file is password protected by yourself.

If the Word document is password protected by yourself, the successful rate of recovering Word password will be greatly improved, as you may have a bit memory about the password.

If you are the person who has a preference when setting a password, list all the passwords that you like to use, and put them in a txt file as dictionary. Import the dictionary, and start Word password recovery with dictionary attack. Frankly speaking, this way has the highest successful rate.

If you only remember some information of the forgotten password, such as the prefix, password length and password elements, Brute-force with Mask Attack would be your best choice to find the unknown word password. The more options you set, the quicker you will finish recovering Word password.

All the above three attack ways are included in Word Password Unlocker, in addition, it improves password recovery speed by using the advanced search algorithm and multiple-core CPUs. A faster running process will be available if you have a powerful CPU.

With this easy-to-use Word password recovery tool, you can get your lost Word password easily without any data lose.

Trick 1: remove PowerPoint modify password

In PowerPoint, you cannot save a file with modify password as another file to remove the password. But you can make use of other word processor software – WPS to remove its password.

Download and install WPS English version. Open your encrypted PowerPoint file with it in the read-only way, and save it as another file. Then you will be able to modify its content.

Trick 2: recover PowerPoint open password.

Though the above trick is very easy and practical, but it is not applicable to open password. You have no other tricks, but to start PowerPoint password recovery by software.

When selecting software, consider its function, feature and price. According to my test of all tools that could recover PowerPoint password, Office Password Unlocker by Password Unlocker Studio is a pretty efficient one, though it only supports PowerPoint 2007.

Office Password Unlocker is popular with MS Office users those who had forgotten or lost Office password. Unlike other Office password recovery tools, there are 3 featured types of attack: Brute-force attack, Brute-force with mask attack and Dictionary attack available offered to recover MS Office password for MS Word/ Excel 2007/2003/2000/97 and PPT/Access 2007.

To improve PowerPoint password recovery speed, it adopts multiple-core processor acceleration technique. The advanced search algorithm enables you to recover PowerPoint password faster than most similar programs.

What’s more, an easy-to-use operation and intuitive interface cannot be ignored, especially for a novice.

Download Office Password Unlocker and try it now!

Information Rights Management (IRM) is a technology which allows for information (mostly in the form of documents and emails) to be ‘remote controlled’, which is far more secure than shared secret passwords. Authors can restrict permission for word documents, workbooks, and presentations on a per-user, per-document, or per-group basis.

Let’s see how to set restrict permission inWord 2007:

1.      Save the document, workbook, or presentation.

2.      Click the Microsoft Office Button, point to Prepare, point to Restrict Permission, and then click restrict access. Or point to review tab in the ribbon, click restrict access under protect document section. This window will appear.

3.      Select the Restrict permission to this document check box, and then assign the access levels that you want for each user.

4.      To give someone Full Control permission, click More Options, and then in the Access Level column, click the arrow, and then click Full Control.

5.      After you assign permission levels, click OK.

The Message Bar appears, indicating that the document is rights-managed. If you need to make any access permission changes to the document, click Change Permission.

If a document with restricted permission is forwarded to an unauthorized person, a message appears with the author’s e-mail address, so that the individual can request permission for the document.

It is safer than setting password, and sharing it with specified persons. If a file is restricted access by using of Information Rights Management, no one can use Office password recovery tools to get the password any more.

Have interest? Try it now. Note that you should create a Windows live ID at first.

Case 1: The encrypted Office file is password protected by others

For encrypted Office document got from the people you can contact, try your best effort to ask them for the password will be the easiest way. If he or she does not want to tell you, do not do illegal hack.

You should know that, if you know nothing about the password, all Office password recovery tools will have to use Brute-force Attack to try all possible passwords, which may cost hours, days or months to crack Office password.

Case 2: The encrypted Office file is password protected by yourself

If the Office document is password protected by yourself, the probability to recover Office password successfully will be greatly improved, as you may have a bit memory about the password.

Option 1: If you are the person who has a preference when setting a password, list all the characters you would like to contain in the password, such as your name, nickname, favorite star, and birthday, etc. After that, you can take Dictionary Attack produced by office Password Unlocker, to find the forgotten password with ease. Frankly speaking, this way has the highest successful rate.

Option 2: If you can remember some information about the forgotten password, such as the prefix characters, the suffix characters, the length of password, etc, Brute-force with Mask Attack can be the most suitable choice to recover Office password as soon as possible. The more options you set, the quicker you will get the password.

Office Password Unlocker helps you recover lost password from Word Document (*.doc, *.docx), Excel Worksheets (*.xls,*.xlsx), PowerPoint Presentation (*.pptx) and Access Database (*.accdb).

It also improves password recovery speed by using the advanced search algorithm and multiple-core CPUs. The more cores your CPU has, the faster Office password recovery speed you will enjoy. What’s more, you are able to save and resume recovery process at any time. Unlike other complicated software, you can handle its operation easily by yourself.