Lost protection and sharing password (200sr1a)

[Mark P]

Clearly I should never have a 5 week holiday again, as in the manic fortnight preceding that I clearly gave one of my workbooks an unpredictable sharing password, rather than the very simple ones I usually use (more to prevent the book being unshared by accident than as a bar to malice), and now can't unprotect it. I've tried all 290 possible permutations of likely passwords, but to no avail. Having had a look around the web, I can find a number of utilities on offer, and have tried a few, but none of them will do it for free (and why should they). I can copy the data, so I'll just lose the code, and I'm too tight to shell out for that from my own pocket! I get the impression from reading these sites that although the open password is encoded with quite strong encryption, the protect and share password is not. If there isn't a free utility, can anyone point me in the right direction to finding it myself?

Thanks

[kieran]

You could try the excel utilities 1.4 at http://www.appspro.com/ for starters.

[JohnBF]

You can also try Erlandsen, but the Open password protection may take a long time to break.