🔓 Unprotect Excel Sheets in Seconds (When You Don't have the Password)

protected a worksheet and forgot the password happens all the time I have my friends and people sending me these files where they have protected a worksheet and now they don't remember the password or sometimes it was created by someone else and now that person is not around thankfully excel's inbuilt worksheet protection is not very robust so you can easily get around it and the best part is you do not need any third party software or website or any tool to do this you can do that right in your computer in less than a minute so let me show you how it's done so here is a dashboard file that I have and I created many years ago and this is protected so I want to work with this but if I come here and I click on any of the cells or try and change anything it shows me this prompt which says the cell or chart you're trying to change is on a protected sheet if I come here and I try and unprotect this sheet then it would show me this prompt where it asks for the password which let's say I do not know so I have these three sheets and all these sheets are protected and also I have a link of this dashboard in the description so you can download it if you want to learn how I've created this dashboard it's part of my free Excel dashboard course so I would also have a link to it so you can see how it was made but coming back to the topic I want to unprotect this entire worksheet or let's say all these three worksheets so I'm going to close this file and I'm going to work with this Excel file here so I have this file in the folder called downloads and the file is named call center dashboard final now the first thing I would do is I would make a copy because I do not want to make changes to the actual file just in case things go wrong so I don't want to mess with the original file so let me make a copy of this file so now it's called call center dashboard final Das copy and now here I'm going to change the extension from xlsx to zip and when I do that it is going to convert this Excel file into a zip folder and it is going to show me this prompt just say yes and now it has converted this file into a zip folder now I can double click into it and it takes me inside and shows me all these folders so I'm going to go into this folder called Excel and when I do that it shows me many more folders but where I'm interested is this folder called worksheets and now when I double click on this it shows me all the worksheets that I have in the file now if you have just one or two worksheets those would show up here if you have more all those worksheets would show up here now I'm going to make some change in this sheet so that the worksheet protection is removed but again I do not want to work with the actual file so let me copy this go back to the downloads folder and put it here so paste it here and now I'm going to work with this so I'm going to right click on this and then I'm going to open it in a word pad or you can open it in a notepad the idea here is that it'll give me a code like this and I want to change this code now it's very simple all you need to do is search for the word protect and when you do that you'll see something like this sheet protection and then some stuff here so what you need to do is select the starting of this word sheeet protection including the bracket and and then just select till the end of the bracket so in this case I'm going to select it till here so this entire part is what is responsible for protecting your sheet so if I remove this part I save this close this now I'm going to copy this go back into this folder this zip folder into worksheets remove this XML file here and I'm going to paste the one that I have changed so I have uh removed the protection from here so let's try this let me go back to the downloads folder and here I'm going to change the zip back into Excel SX so now when I change this it'll again show me this prompt just say yes and now it has converted this zip folder back into an Excel file and if I open this again I see my dashboard so everything is as is but you will see that now I can make changes to these cells which means that the worksheet protection has been removed so even if you do not know the password you can still easily remove the worksheet protection and I only removed it from sheet number three you will see that these sheet the calculation sheet and the data sheet are still protected so you can again go back into the zip folder and unprotect those sheets as well so this is how you can easily remove worksheet protection from any Excel file in a couple of steps that's it in this video I hope you found this useful also if you're liking these videos please subscribe to this YouTube channel and click on the Bell icon so that you never miss out on any new Excel tips video I come up with thank you and have a a nice day [Applause] [Music]

Channel: TrumpExcel

Views: 53,643

Keywords: how to unprotect excel sheet, unlock excel spreadsheet, crack excel sheets, excel unprotect sheet, unlock protected excel sheets without password, excel forgot password, unprotect sheet without password, unprotect excel sheet, remove excel password without software, Unprotect Worksheets in Excel (Without Knowing the Password), advanced excel, excel, excel basics, excel tips, free excel training, free online excel training for beginners, learn excel, sumit bansal, trump excel

Id: oq59u0rpkiE

Length: 4min 36sec (276 seconds)

Published: Tue May 14 2024