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How To Unprotect Excel Sheet With Password
How To Unprotect Excel Sheet With Password
The tutorial shows how to protect Excel sheet with or without passwords. It also explains how to unlock Excel
spreadsheet without password if you forgot or misplaced it.
When sharing your worksheets with other people or sending your Excel files outside of your organization, you
may want to prevent other users from changing cells that shouldn't be changed, and also from moving or
deleting important data in your worksheet or workbook.
Luckily, Excel provides a quick and easy way to lock a sheet or password protect an entire workbook to
prevent accidental or deliberate changes in their contents.
In older versions (below Microsoft Excel 2010), it doesn't even matter how long and complex your password is.
Anyone who has at least some basic knowledge of VBA can crack it in minutes (here's an example of the VBA
code that easily cracks passwords in Excel 2010 and lower versions).
The recent versions of Excel 2013 and 2016 use more sophisticated methods of sheet protection, but they are
also vulnerable and can be unlocked without knowing a password. In other words, if someone really wants to
get access to a protected sheet, they will.
So, does this mean that Excel worksheet protection is absolutely pointless? Not at all! It makes sense to lock
Excel sheets to avoid accidental changes in the sheet contents. A common example is Locking formula cells to
prevent inadvertent erasure or modification of formulas.
The bottom line is - lock an Excel spreadsheet to prevent other users from accidentally tampering with your
data, but never store sensitive information in your Excel sheets.
If you strive to ensure the maximum security protection for your Excel files, be sure to do all of the
following:
1. Use the modern versions of Excel 2010, Excel 2013, and 2016 with enhanced data encryption mechanisms.
2. Protect your sheets with strong passwords that include different types of alpha numeric characters and
special symbols. At that, try to make passwords as random as possible, for example by using our password
generating tool.
3. Protect the workbook structure to prevent other people from adding, moving, renaming, deleting or
unhiding your sheets.
4. For workbook-level security, encrypt the workbook with different passwords from opening and modifying.
5. If possible, store your Excel files with sensitive information in a secure location, e.g. on an encrypted hard
drive.
1. Right click a worksheet tab at the bottom of your screen and select Protect Sheet… from the context
menu.
Or, click the Protect Sheet button on the Review tab, in the Changes group.
To password protect your Excel sheet, type a password in the corresponding field. Be sure to
remember the password or store it in a safe location because you will need it later to unprotect the
sheet.
If the worksheet protection is nothing more than a precaution against accidental modification of the
sheet contents by yourself or by the members of your local team, you may not want to bother about
memorizing the password and leave the password field empty. In this case, unprotecting the sheet
takes just a single click on the Unprotect Sheet button on the ribbon or in the sheet tab's right-click menu.
To allow some other actions such as sorting, filtering, formatting cells, deleting or inserting rows and
columns, check the corresponding boxes.
If you don't check any action, users will only be able to view the contents of your Excel sheet.
3. The Confirm Password dialog box will pop-up prompting you to retype the password so that an accidental
misprint won't lock your Excel sheet forever. Retype the password and click OK. Done!
On the Home tab, in the Cells group, click Format, and select Unprotect Sheet from the drop-down menu.
If you are dealing with a password-protected worksheet, Excel will ask you to enter the password. Type the
password and click OK.
If the worksheet was not protected with password, clicking the Unprotect Sheet button is all it takes to
unlock the sheet.
Unlock Excel spreadsheet with VBA code (for Excel 2010 and lower)
If you are using Excel 2010 or older version, you can unlock a password-protected sheet with the following
macro.
1. Open your Excel document and switch to the password-protected sheet (it should be active when you run
the macro).
3. Right-click the workbook name on the left pane (Project-VBAProject pane) and select Insert > Module from
the context menu.
Sub PasswordBreaker() ?
'Breaks worksheet password protection.
Exit Sub
End If
5. Press F5 or click the Run button on the toolbar and wait a couple of minutes.
6. The macro will report a cracked password, which is not the original one (always some combination of A's
and B's), but nevertheless it works. You do not need to remember this fake password or enter it anywhere.
Simply click OK and the sheet is unprotected!
If your Excel file contains more than one protected sheet, run the macro for each sheet individually to
unprotect it.
To unprotect Excel sheet without password in the modern versions of Excel 2019, Excel 2016 and Excel
2013, you can save the document as Excel 97-2003 workbook (*.xls) first. Then, close Excel and reopen
the workbook - it will be opened in compatibility mode. Run the macro to unprotect the worksheet, and
then save the workbook back as an .xlsx file. Alternatively, you can use one of free tools, for example
Password Protection Remover add-in for Excel. Or you can upload the protected Excel worksheet to your
Google Drive, and then open it with Google Sheets (thank you for the tip, Kanan!).
In case you are not very comfortable with VBA, you can find the detailed guidance in the following
tutorial: How to insert and run VBA code in Excel.
2. With the cursor positioned in cell A1, press Shift + Ctrl + End to select all used cells in the worksheet.
4. Create a new sheet in the current workbook or in a different workbook (to create a new Excel file, simply
press Ctrl + N ).
5. In the new blank worksheet, place the cursor in A1 and press Ctrl + V to paste the contents of the
password-protected sheet.
Notes:
This method works only if the Select locked cells and Select unlocked cells actions are allowed in the
protected spreadsheet.
If the password-protected worksheet has external links to other sheets or workbooks, you may need to
re-create those links manually.
You can use Paste Special to copy / paste the column widths so you won't need to adjust them in the new
sheet manually.
1. On the Review tab, in the Changes group, click the Protect Workbook button.
2. Under Protect workbook for, select one of the two options, or both:
Check the Structure box to protect the structure of a workbook. This will prevent the following actions:
Inserting new sheets and chart sheets. However, users will be able to insert a chart in an existing
worksheet.
Check the Windows box to retain the size and position of workbook windows. This will prevent users
from moving, resizing, minimizing, or closing the workbook windows.
Note. The Windows option is not available (greyed out) in Excel 2013 and Excel 2016, as shown in the
screenshot above. It is because Microsoft introduced the Single Document Interface in Excel 2013,
where each workbook has its own top-level window that can be minimized, restored, and closed.
As indicated on the dialog window, a password is optional. However, if you do not enter a password, then
anybody will be able to unlock your workbook with a button click.
4. Retype the password in the Confirm Password window and click OK. That's it!
Important note! Protecting the workbook structure should not be confused with workbook-level
password encryption that can prevent other users from opening or/and modifying your workbook. If you
are interested in this level of workbook protection, check out the next sections of this tutorial.
1. In the workbook you want to encrypt, click File > Info, click the Protect Workbook button, and select Encrypt
with Password in the drop-down menu.
2. The Encrypt Document window will appear, you enter a password in the Password box, and click OK.
By default, Microsoft Excel uses AES 128-bit advanced encryption, and you can supply a password up to
255 characters.
3. Retype the password in the Reenter password box, and click OK.
To remove the workbook encryption, repeat the above steps, delete the password from the Password box,
click OK, and then save your workbook.
Tip. In addition to password-protection, you can secure your Excel files further by using the BitLocker Drive
Encryption, which is available in the Ultimate and Enterprise editions of Windows Vista and Windows.
1. In your Excel workbook, click the Save As button, and then click the Tools button at the bottom of the
window.
2. In the Tools drop-down menu, select General Options.
3. In the General Options dialog window, type a password in the Password to modify box. Additionally, you
can select the Read-only option, which is recommended.
Tip. If you want to protect your Excel file both from modifying and opening, type the passwords in the
Password to open and Password to modify boxes. It can be the same password of two different ones.
4. Retype the password in the Confirm Password dialog, and click OK. If you've entered 2 passwords in the
previous step, you will be asked to confirm both.
This is how you can protect an Excel sheet and lock the entire workbook from changing or opening. However,
sometimes you may not want to go that far and rather lock only certain cells in your sheet. And this is exactly
what we are going to discuss in the next article. I thank you for reading and hope to see you on our blog next
week.
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