Using password protection on Excel files allows us to easily control who can access the data inside workbooks by sharing passwords with certain people. Sometimes, you want to change some data in the workbook and share it again with others, but with a different password. You might want to remove the password so that everyone can access it.

Either way, you can modify or remove an Excel workbook password in a few simple steps. This is how to do it.

With the above steps, you can protect your Excel file with a new password that you can share again.

If you want to remove the password, you have to follow steps one to four. Next, you need to leave the Password field blank in step five instead of entering the password. Password removal does not require confirmation.

Share your file by changing excel workbook password

So, how can you change or remove password for excel files. When you do, be sure to save the workbook. If not, the change won’t take effect, and you’ll end up sharing the workbook with the same old password, causing problems for both you and the recipient.

Whenever you password protect an Excel VBA document, make sure you write it down in a few different places. Even if you could recover Excel VBA password, it would not be easy. Take extra care of this.

Stuck with a password protected VBA document? Here’s how to pick a lock.

It’s not uncommon to take ownership of someone else’s Excel document, especially in the workplace. Generally, the transition goes smoothly – but there are pitfalls that can cause some real headaches.

For example, six months later you may try to edit one of the VBA macros that is integral to the spreadsheet, only to find that it is password protected. Now what happened? Well, with a little tinkering behind the scenes, it’s not too difficult to completely remove that protection.

Here’s how to eliminate password protection from a VBA document in Excel. It might make you think twice about how secure your spreadsheets really are.

how to set password

If you need to crack a password, you may already know how to set it up. However, it is still worth explaining how this type of protection works.

In Excel go to the Developer tab and click on Macros.

If you don’t see the Developer tab, go to File > Options, and then Customize the Ribbon. Now move the Developer command group from the left pane to the right.

Copy and paste the following code into the Visual Basic editor. This is a simple macro that will enter the quoted text into cell A1. It doesn’t have any real purpose, but we need something to password protect.

Click OK, make sure to save your Excel document as an XLSM file, and we can test whether our password works. Close and reopen your document, then go to the Developer tab and click on Visual Basic.

You will see a password prompt when you try to access the relevant VBAProject. Now we can figure out how to remove such protection.

how to remove password

Now for the hard part, though it’s actually quite straightforward when you know what you’re doing. First, we’ll need to download a hex editor. HXD is a good free option if you don’t already have one, but there are lots of other options available.

Our process varies slightly depending on whether we’re cracking a password in an old XLS file or a new XLSM file. If you’re working with the former, feel free to skip to the next part.

Creating our XLSM file

We need to do a little extra prep work to extract password from XLSM file. Find it on your hard drive, then rename it by adding .zip to the end.

Next, open it with archive compression software like WinRAR or 7-Zip. You should get a folder labeled xl.