Have you ever had a password-protected Excel document that needed opening up? It happened to me a couple of years ago. I worked for a company that used an Excel sheet in a shared folder to store passwords to different websites that the company had accounts on. One of the policies the company had was that the password to this spreadsheet would change on a routine basis, just following protocol; but the person who changed it must have typed in the wrong password. The spreadsheet was locked, but the new password just didn’t work. They tried various misspellings but still couldn’t unlock it.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, they had to bin the spreadsheet and start all over again; but today I found a product they could have used to retreive the password. It’s an Excel Password Recovery tool that has two options. It can either unlock the document and just remove the password from it. Or else, it can run a brute-force attack on the file and figure out what the password actually is. Depending on which method you use, there are different parts of the program to use, but the end effect is that you can finally get back into your document.
Pity we didn’t have access to this program back then; it could have saves lots of time and effort if that had been the case.