How to Hack Worksheet Passwords in Microsoft Excel

hi there jamie here at teachers tech  hope you're having a great day today   i recently made a video about three different ways  on how to protect your excel data and one of the   worries i showed you was protecting your worksheet  with a password and i also mentioned that   you can hack that password in case you forgot it  so you can access that data again so what i mean   is when it's locked and if you try to change the  number you're going to get this pop-up here that   tells you there's a password and if you click on  unprotect sheet there's the password and if you   don't know it or have forgotten it i want to show  you how you can hack it today on teachers tech so i just want to point out on this workbook  i have two different sheets i have no graphs   here you can see in sales order this is the one  that's password protected if i go to change it   i get the i get this and i want to break that  so i can open it without knowing the password   so what i'm going to do is make sure you have  this saved up i already have this saved in this   folder right here so i'm going to go ahead and  close this and open up this folder and the first

thing i want to do is just show the extension name  and i'm on windows 11 so i'm just going to go to   view show and go to file name extensions and now  i can see the dot xlsx next is to create a copy of   this because if you do corrupt this as we make the  changes you still have your original so i'm just   going to right click and you can see the different  options you can go control c control v which i'm   going to do right now to copy and then to paste  control v at this point i need to change the file   extension so this dot xlsx needs to be changed  to dot zip or zip so i'm going to right click   and i'm going to just go to rename or f2 on this  and i'm just going to change this just like this   so i'm going to click off it off of it and it's  going to warn me that asking if i want to change   this i'm going to say yes so now it is changed  so i just want to point out you do need a zip   program on this to do the following steps so i i'm  using winrar here but whatever one you're using   you can follow along with that one what i need to  do now is double click on this file to open it up

and so it will open up with what zip program you  have as default i have the winrar one and i need   to go you can see the contents of this file i  need to go to this excel folder and open it up   then i need to go to worksheets right here i have  sheet 1 and sheet 2. remember i showed you that at   the very beginning that i had two different sheets  and one was prosper protected and one wasn't sheet   2 is the one with password protection what i  need to do at this point is actually i'm going   to drag it over to this file to work and you could  drag it to your desktop if you want but i'm just   going to take this sheet too and drag it over  into the same place i'm going to open it up and

look for something in here so i'm going to  just double click on it in my case i'm going   to open this up with notepad to do the editing  on this so i'm going to select notepad hit ok   don't be overwhelmed with what you're seeing here  because we're just going to use a find the find   command to search what we're looking for and so if  you use control hold down control and then hit f   you're going to find this right here so we need to  type the word protection in so when you typed it   in just hit find next and you can see it finds it  right here this tells me that there's a password   in this file in this worksheet if it  didn't have this word protection then it wouldn't   have this so we would be on the wrong sheet we  know this one wouldn't be password protected   what we need to do is delete something from this  file so where this word protection is we need to   go to the start of this angled bracket here and i  need to highlight to the end where i see it closed   so you can kind of go slowly through this and  right here is where it closes so this is the end   where the bracket closes i'm going to hit delete  on this just like that and i'm going to save the   file again so just file and save and i can close  this down so what i need to do at this point so

i have my uh i have my winrar program still open  i could delete this or over i could bring it in   and copy over but just to be safe i'm just gonna  delete this file here and i'm gonna drag sheet 2   back into it just like this i'm going to hit  ok and i have my new one inside here that i've   deleted that password that protection line of code  from there so at this point what i need to do i'm   just going to go back to over here and i'm going  to change this back to the extension that i had   before that xlsx so i'm going to right click on  this and i'm going to go rename get rid of the zip   at the end and put in x l s x just like that and i  want to make sure that i'm okay with this hit yes   let's go and open this one now this remember this  isn't the original one this is just a copy of it   if i open this one up i'm going to go to this  let's see if i can i'm on sheet 2 i'm going to   see if i can change the number now and i put a  random number and it let me so if i go back to   the original sheet though and open this one up and  if i try to change something here it's not letting   me the past it's still protected inside of this so  if you ever get into a gem where you've forgotten   your password or maybe someone passed password  protected a sheet and you got to make sure you   got to make those changes to it try this trick in  order to be able to get access to that again so i   hope you like this microsoft excel tip on how to  unlock those sheets that were the on with those   forgotten passwords let me know what you think  and what else you're looking to learn thanks   for watching this time on teachers tech i'll see  you next time with more tech tips and tutorials