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MS Excel is one
of the most widely used spreadsheet applications that is typically
used for maintaining records. It is well- known for performing fast
calculations and for its advanced macro programming language called
Visual Basic for Applications. It is a cynosure of both the office
and home users. You can also secure your Excel spreadsheet by
applying a set of passwords. In this way, you can prevent
unauthorized users from accessing or tampering with your work-related
data. You can protect a single cell, multiple cells, or the entire
Microsoft Excel sheet. Microsoft provides two types of password
protection to your excel workbook:
- Password To Open: The 'Password To Open' prevents your Excel workbook from unauthorized or unwanted user access. You cannot open your Excel workbook without knowing its 'Password To Open'.
- Password To Modify: After you apply the 'Password To Modify', your workbook (excel sheet) becomes 'read only'. This means that no one can make changes to the Excel workbook without knowing its 'Password To Modify'.
However,
a majority of users are inclined to set strong passwords to their
Excel files. As a consequence, they end up losing these passwords and
making their important records and other data in the spreadsheet
inaccessible. To deal with such circumstances, you need to go for
excel password recovery through
a competent third-party tool.
Let
us discuss a practical scenario. Suppose you are an HR of a big
multi-national firm. You are responsible for creating a salary
description sheet in MS excel 2007 for every employee and also
protect this document from authorized user access. To accomplish
this, you set a 'password to modify' to your Excel file. You also
maintain a Word document, which contains passwords for all the
employees. One fine day, you unknowingly delete the Word document by
pressing 'shift+delete'. Soon after this, you realize that you have
done a blunder. At this stage, the need for an Excel
password recovery software
ensues.
These
third-party software use Brute-Force attack to try out every possible
character combination for cracking the lost Excel password. They can
accurately recover both 'password to open' and 'password to modify'.
They use advanced masking techniques to effectively narrow down the
password search and also allow saving the password recovery log in a
separate text file. Additionally, they support MS Excel
2007, 2003, 2002, and 2000.