Have You Suffered a Lost Excel Password Situation

Have you suffered a Lost Excel Password situation when using the program? This is a sometime-occurrence when setting passwords for common office-type programs like Excel. Many times, the problem can be solved in a number of different ways, or by using commercially-available software programs to recover the password. Many of these software programs rely on what's called a brute force attack in computer-speak. What that means is that the software tries to crack the password code by applying a large number of possibilities in a systematic way.

However, MS Excel 97 through 2003 programs provide three search methods for finding the password. The first involves brute force. The second utilizes an attack upon the word by an enhanced mask, and the last by an enhanced dictionary-based attack. The enhanced mask is actually a kind of brute force attack, only you supply the search parameters through use of that mask function. It usually works best for instances when you can remember a part of the password you lost. This way, you can specify the high and low ends (or range of values) for each password position.

So, don't get too anxious about a lost password just yet, because the program can generally recover the password through those brute force and dictionary attack programs. The best solution is to have an amalgam of the three password cracking attack types all working to recover that password, and it will work in many instances. For Excel programs newer than 2003, like Excel 2007, there are a couple of free sharware password cracker programs and several proprietary programs available.

Excel 2007 is a more robust version, and it really tries to make it very hard to recover the lost password. The available solutions in these software versions almost always involve a combination of the brute force and the dictionary attack to do their job. In cases where you randomly generated a non-linear or non-sequential password, the brute force will probably be your best bet.

Given the technologies and software items available to help recover a lost Excel password, you won't have to become too stressed out when trying to recover it. Use the Help menu in Excel, for starters. And then take advantage of the software's password recovery programs. If you have no success with that, look to a couple of open-source and shareware programs. Lastly, you can buy a commercially available one as a final resort.
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