UKH

Hi, I have(stupidly) for the first time ever locked myself out of a Word document, we only used this password briefly before changing it to something that we felt would be more useful over an extended period. I know it probably had my date and the year in it. Any suggestions as to how I might unlock it or remove the password, it is quite an important document. I did create and own the document.

Thanks

Rich

In reply to Solsbury:

If you can open the doc as read-only you may be able to bypass the password by saving as an older Word format. Not sure which Mac Word format would work but if you do a search you’d probably find it. Otherwise there are utilities for removing Word passwords. 

In reply to Solsbury:

Opening in libreoffice or OpenOffice will possibly work,  you can then save file without the protection. 

In reply to Solsbury Cheers all, found an earlier draft so some urgency gone. Will try the office ibre etc but my general scouting around doesn't leave me very hopeful.

In reply to Solsbury:

Is it a .doc or .docx ?

You can remove the passwords off either but the method is different. 

In reply to Solsbury:

If it's a password that you need in order to open the document, and it's the newer .docx format (not sure how macs work) then you are probably , effectively, stuffed. Or at least restricted to finding an old pre-password protected backup as you have already done.

The password on these newer formats is a proper encryption job that effectively means you have to brute force it - of course there are tools to do this, but it's an acquired and slow taste. Basically have to smash through every possible permutation until they find the right one. 

If my maths are right, for an order of magnitude idea if the password could be lower or upper case letters plus the numbers 0-9 then that's 26+26+10 = 62 possible combinations for each letter. For a 10 character password that is 62^10 possible combinations = 839,299,365,868,340,224 to try before you are guaranteed to find the right password. If there are any extra characters such as 10 possible special ones like ! or # or  then 72^10 = 3,743,906,242,624,487,424‬ possible permutations

Find a machine that can try 100 million different passwords every second and it will take 1187 years to try every combination. Current machines can only manage a few thousand tries per second so even 1187 years is rather optimistic unless you get very very lucky.

If you have a brute force tool that supports taking enough information to allow it to intelligently try permutations such as including parts of the date and year to dramatically narrow down the options then you may be in with a chance, failing that you need the resources of a state spy agency.

How lucky do you feel? 

In reply to Snyggapa:

Not true for .docx, you can disable the password without brute forcing it. The trick is to rename the file as a .zip,  open it in an archive program whatever mac users have instead of winzip and then remove a short text string from one of the files you find inside which means word won't look for the password. Once you have altered that text string you can rename the file back to a docx. This doesn't overwrite the password but enables you to extract the text and then resave in a new file with a new password. 

In reply to Reach>Talent:

I may be wrong but as I understand it that only works if for "read only, you need to enter this to save it" passwords - not ones that you need to open the document in the first place. Document open passwords encrypt the zip (the .docx, .xlsx etc) with the password so that you can't open the zip at all.

In reply to Snyggapa:

The only docx passwords I had issue with were restricted write, not general opening. Unfortunately other officex files don't seem to work, pptx being particularly bad.

In reply to Solsbury: Thanks all, it is not possible to open without a password, oh that it were. Spoke to a friend/data retrieval company and it is a matter of brute force. No symbols, 4 numbers and definitely no x, z's so about £300. Hoping the person I sent it (and other docs with same password) has it buried in their notes and I do have draft now. First time for everything, lesson learned.