Handy Hudsonite here. I’m going to show you how we can get access to a password protected Excel
worksheet without even knowing the password. Maybe you forgot the password. Maybe it's been
misplaced. Maybe this worksheet has been given to you by a coworker and no one in the office
knows the password. How do we get access to it? And we'll do it without even using any third-party
software. And I'll show you exactly how to do it right now. Let's go over to open my Excel
spreadsheet. I have some random sales data here, and when this opens up,
we'll see that it is password protected as I try to change anything in here you see it has this
pop up. That cell is that says that this is. Protected sheet, so there's no way that I can
make any changes to this. I'm locked out of it. I don't know the password. If I were to go into here
and click the unprotected sheet in the review tab. I could try a whole bunch of different passwords,
but it's just going to tell me that the password is wrong. So, what do I do in order to hit into
this spreadsheet? That probably has vital data for your company for your organization, maybe even for
your own family? How can we get in here to access the data to be able to change it and work with it
well? All we need to do is we need to go into this file, and we need to make a couple of small
changes and I'm going to show you exactly how to do that, so let's close this out. So here we are
on my desktop, and this is the file. And before we do anything let's make sure. That we have a backup
of this, and so what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a copy of this. And just have a backup.
Let's go into the desktop folder. It'll be easier to work with it in here and what we want
to do here with the original, not the copy. Please make sure to get that copy made. We go in here to
the original and what we want to do is we want to change the file name. It's currently an Excel
file which is the. XLSX I'm going to right click on this and then we're going to do rename. And I
should say, if you don't see this extension here, the Excel CX, XLSX in your folder.
To simply come up here to view and make sure this box is checked, filename extensions.
So again, right click will rename this and we want to rename it to. We want to make it a zip file.
And it's going to give me a confirmation message. Are we sure we want to change it? Yes, we do. So,
it is now a zip file and depending on what type of unzip program you have with and there's a variety
of programs out there or you're just using the windows unzip like me. Though it does default to.
The VLC media player, so I'm going to open it with Windows Explorer. And when you open
this file, this zip file, it's going to populate like this. We want to go into the Excel folder.
And then into the worksheets folder. Now there's three worksheets here, because there were three
tabs in my workbook, and it was on the second sheet that I was password protecting. So,
we wanted double click on this and my computer is asking me what program to open it in.
Notepad is fine. Probably a good easy program to work with in this over here so you can see it.
Now what we want to do is - this looks extremely complicated and trust me this is not that hard.
So, what we want to do is find a particular word, the word “protect”, and an easy way to
do it is there's a shortcut. Control F. And just type protecting here like what I have and then
click find next and then you can close that box out. So here it found protect and it's part of.
The phrase here “sheet protection” and you see this bracket. Here on the left side, we want to
highlight everything to the right. Over to the next bracket. Which I believe is right here,
but you're going to want to confirm. And you can scroll back to make sure that there's no other]
which there doesn't seem to be, because you don't want to delete more than you need to,
or you're going to corrupt the file, which is why we made the backup,
so now. Just go ahead and delete that. And then we're going to want to save a new copy of this, so
you can. You can hit control S and it's going to ask where we want to save it. The desktop is fine
because we're going to keep this to the side. Can close that out. OK, so what we're going to do is
we're actually going to replace the sheet dot XML file that we originally worked with the one
over here on my desktop that I saved. After I took the protect. Code out of it.
So, let's delete the one here. This sheet two dot XML. I'm going to delete that. It's going
to give me confirmation I'm delete. And then all I have to do is click and drag this one over.
Into the file and there it is. And then the last thing that we have to do is go back
and we're going to just. Rename this back to an Excel file so we just add the XLS
XLSX extension on it. Again. It's going to give me a confirmation. And there we go. It's back to
the Excel format, so when I click into this. It should allow me to edit the file now and.
Let's see what happens, so here's the same data file. I'm on the food sales tab and there we
go. I can type into it. I can change the data in here, not that I want to, so that's how you can
regain access to it. Excel password protected file. Very easy to do and please let me know
in the comments below if you have any questions or comments or other tricks that you have with Excel,
or anything related to the password protected sheets. Be sure to give this video a like so
that YouTube will promote it among people who need to know this. And subscribe to my channel
for more tips on topics like this and a variety of others and I'll see you in the next video.