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Remove Password-Protection from Excel Document

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Microsoft Office, resolved, Software

I have an Excel document, but some of the cells are “protected” with a password. I didn’t create the file, and I do not know the password. What should I do?

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  1. Solution Center on May 29, 2018

    Fear not, Freak Show. Just change the extension on the file to “.zip”. Excel files are really compressed files that are composed of many .xml files. By changing the extension, we can extract the contents and edit them. Extract everything to a new folder on your desktop. Dig into the ‘WORKSHEETS’ folder and locate the sheet in question (sheet1). Open this file in a text editor and find “sheetProtection”. You may delete the entire tag. You might choose to do this for all sheets. Then save the xml files and re-zip the entire collection. Then rename the extension to “.xlsx”. Voila.
    unprotect xml file


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