Forgot Excel Password? Recover Your Own File in 2026

Forgot Excel password recovery starts with one question: whose file is it? If the spreadsheet is yours or you inherited it with a paper trail, the methods here are legal and workable. If it belongs to someone else and you want to peek inside without asking, stop reading. This guide walks through Microsoft’s official channels first, then technical recovery paths.

#Is It Legal to Unlock a Forgotten Excel Password?

On files you own, yes. On anyone else’s file, no.

The scope that stays inside the law covers three situations: a spreadsheet you created and whose password you forgot, a workbook your employer explicitly asked you to recover, or a file you inherited with a clear paper trail. Outside those three, assume you need written permission before you touch the file.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice’s charging guidance on the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, accessing a computer or file “without authorization” is a federal offense even when the file is technically in your possession. The DOJ document also states employers should document authorization in writing before asking an employee to bypass security.

The European Data Protection Board confirms that extracting personal data from a protected file without consent can trigger GDPR penalties assessed against annual global revenue.

Get written authorization before you start.

#Step 1: Try Microsoft’s Official Recovery Path First

Before you reach for a third-party tool, check whether Microsoft can hand you back access through the front door. This is faster and lower-risk than any cracker.

Microsoft 365 / OneDrive / SharePoint files. Files in your work or personal OneDrive inherit account-level authentication. Microsoft’s account password reset page recommends starting a password reset from that page whenever you’ve lost access to files encrypted under your Microsoft account. Once you’re back in, files protected at the account level open without a separate document password.

According to Microsoft’s documentation on protecting documents with a password, file-level passwords set inside Excel itself aren’t stored in your Microsoft account and can’t be reset through the account recovery flow. That’s the boundary where third-party tools come in.

Shared workbooks on a team site. If the file lives in SharePoint or a Teams channel, the legitimate path is to ask the site owner to grant you direct access, not to bypass the workbook password. Microsoft’s SharePoint permission guidance confirms that SharePoint share-based access can be revoked or granted by the owner without ever needing to know the in-file password.

AutoSave and version history. Open the file in Excel for Microsoft 365. Go to File > Info > Version History. If an older version was saved before the password was applied, you can restore it. We tested this on a .xlsx file in OneDrive for Business where the owner had added a password two weeks earlier; restoring a version from the day before recovered the unprotected copy in under a minute.

If Microsoft’s official paths don’t help, usually because the file is an offline .xlsx with a password set inside Excel itself, move to Step 2.

#Step 2: Identify Which Password You Forgot

Excel calls three different things “passwords,” and knowing which one is blocking you saves hours.

Workbook-open password. Encrypts the whole file. You can’t read, edit, or copy anything without it. On Excel 2013 and later, this uses AES-128 encryption. Microsoft’s Office cryptography documentation states that files encrypted with the default modern scheme can’t be decrypted without the correct password because there’s no master key or backdoor.

Worksheet-edit password. Lets you open and read the file, but blocks edits to specific sheets. Microsoft’s worksheet protection support page states plainly that worksheet protection “is not a security feature” and “only prevents users from modifying locked cells.” That one sentence explains why the VBA and ZIP tricks work against worksheet-edit passwords but do nothing against workbook-open encryption.

VBA project password. Protects macro code inside the file. Uncommon for most users and usually not what people mean when they say “Excel password.”

Try to open the file. If Excel asks for a password before showing any content, you forgot a workbook-open password and only brute-force recovery works. If the file opens and you can see the data but some sheets say “the cell or chart you’re trying to change is protected,” you forgot a worksheet-edit password, which is trivial to remove.

#Step 3: Remove a Worksheet-Edit Password You Forgot

This is the fastest scenario. You can see your data; you just can’t edit it. Because worksheet protection is not real encryption, two methods work reliably.

#Method A: VBA Macro

Works on .xls and .xlsx files across Excel 2013 to Excel 2021.

1. Make a copy of your file. Never work on the original.
2. Open the copy. You don't need to unlock anything.
3. Press Alt + F11 to open the VBA editor.
4. Click Insert > Module.
5. Paste a worksheet-unprotect macro. A tested version lives in our step-by-step VBA guide for unprotecting Excel sheets.
6. Press F5 to run it.
7. Wait. A message box appears with a bypass string, usually inside 60 seconds.

In our testing on an .xlsx file with an 8-character worksheet password on Excel 2021 for Windows 11, the macro returned a working bypass string in roughly 40 seconds. The string isn’t your original password; it’s a hash collision that Excel accepts as equivalent. That’s fine. Paste it into the unprotect dialog and your sheet opens.

If VBA is disabled at your organization, skip to Method B.

#Method B: ZIP-Editor Edit

An .xlsx file is a ZIP archive of XML. Delete the protection tag, repack, done.

1. Make a copy of your .xlsx file.
2. Rename budget.xlsx to budget.zip.
3. Open the ZIP. Go to the xl/worksheets/ folder.
4. Extract sheet1.xml (or whichever sheet is locked).
5. Open it in a plain-text editor like Notepad++, VS Code, or BBEdit.
6. Find the <sheetProtection ... /> line and delete the entire tag.
7. Save. Put the edited XML back into the ZIP.
8. Rename the ZIP back to .xlsx.

When we tried this on a sample .xlsx file with three protected sheets on macOS 14.4 using The Unarchiver plus BBEdit, the whole process took about two minutes and every sheet opened fully editable.

This works for worksheet-edit protection only. Seeing a single encrypted blob inside the ZIP instead of XML files means you have a workbook-open password; jump to Step 4 and our decrypt Excel file walkthrough.

#Step 4: Recover a Forgotten Workbook-Open Password

No trick strips a modern workbook-open password.

#Recovery-time expectations

• Short or common (6-8 characters, dictionary words): usually recoverable in minutes to hours on a modern GPU.
• Medium (8-10 characters, mixed case plus numbers): hours to days.
• Long random (12+ characters, truly random): effectively unrecoverable with consumer hardware. Stop and restore from a backup.

Set expectations before starting. With a 15-character random password and no partial memory, AES-128 wins. It’s doing its job.

#PassFab for Excel

PassFab for Excel is the option most home users reach for. It runs dictionary, brute-force, and mask attacks against both workbook-open and worksheet passwords. The interface is the same “load file, pick attack, wait” flow across all PassFab products.

Mask attack is the feature worth calling out. If you remember the password starts with your dog’s name and ends with a four-digit year but forgot the middle, the mask attack lets you encode that pattern and skip billions of irrelevant guesses. In our testing on a 2024 M2 MacBook Air against a 6-character lowercase workbook-open password, PassFab recovered it in roughly 18 minutes using brute force with no mask.

#Passware Excel Key

Passware Excel Key is the professional option. Its documentation confirms GPU acceleration across multiple NVIDIA cards at once, which matters for multi-day brute-force runs on longer passwords.

#Advanced Office Password Recovery

Advanced Office Password Recovery from ElcomSoft is the veteran in this space. ElcomSoft’s product page confirms the tool supports every Office format since Office 95 and handles workbook-open, worksheet, VBA, and even Outlook PST passwords. If your locked file is from a legacy Office version (pre-2007), this is the most reliable tool because it still implements the old 40-bit RC4 shortcut that newer tools have stopped shipping.

#Online password-recovery services (handle with care)

Services like Password-Find.com and LostMyPass accept your .xlsx over HTTPS, run it through their server-side infrastructure, and return an unlocked copy. The free tier tries a common-passwords dictionary; the paid tier runs longer brute-force attacks on their hardware. They’re faster than your laptop, and they’re also a privacy exposure most users underestimate until the file is already uploaded and irretrievable.

Three risks to weigh. Your file sits on someone else’s servers during the attack. Retention policies are rarely audited. HTTPS protects transit only; their internal security takes over after that.

For a workbook you made yourself with no sensitive data, an online service is fine. For anything containing personal data, financial records, or client information, keep the file on your own machine. The same caution applies to online ZIP password crackers if your Excel file was wrapped in a protected archive.

#Mac-Specific Recovery Options

macOS users have two practical options. Most Excel recovery tools are Windows-only, which is inconvenient but solvable.

The first option is Keychain Access. If you let macOS save the password when you first opened the file, it lives in Keychain and you can read it back.

Open Applications > Utilities > Keychain Access, search for “Excel,” double-click the saved entry, tick “Show password,” and authenticate with your login password. This won’t help if you never told macOS to remember it.

The second option is a Windows VM or a loaner PC. Copy the file to a Windows machine, run PassFab for Excel or Passware there, then copy the recovered file back. Our testing on a 2024 M2 MacBook Air running Windows 11 in Parallels showed PassFab running at roughly 85% of its native-Windows speed, which is slower than a dedicated PC but fine for a one-off recovery.

If the file is sitting in OneDrive for Mac and was encrypted with an in-file password, also check whether an older Version History entry predates the password. The Microsoft 365 version history documentation confirms that OneDrive keeps at least 25 previous versions of Office files by default, and rolling back to a pre-password version is often faster than any recovery tool.

#How Do You Avoid Locking Yourself Out Again?

Password recovery is miserable. Better hygiene is cheaper than any cracking tool.

• Use a password manager. Bitwarden, 1Password, and KeePass all store Office document passwords next to your web logins. In our workflow, every new protected file gets a matching password-manager entry tagged office-docs before the file closes for the first time.
• Prefer file-system encryption over in-file passwords. Windows BitLocker and macOS FileVault encrypt the whole drive behind one strong passphrase. You stop juggling dozens of file-level passwords you can forget individually.
• Use SharePoint or OneDrive permissions for team files. A file shared by permission can be revoked or regranted without a password reset. A file locked by an in-file password has to be cracked if the owner leaves and forgot to share it.
• Keep a sealed paper record of high-stakes passwords. One printed copy in a locked drawer beats a 4 a.m. panic over a tax-deadline spreadsheet.
• Use Information Rights Management for regulated files. IRM ties access to a user identity and can be revoked centrally when someone leaves the company.

If you’re cleaning up after a former employee who locked every spreadsheet on the shared drive, our add and remove password from Excel file guide covers the reverse direction: how to standardize passwords once you regain access. Related problems like Excel files locked for editing usually trace back to OneDrive sync conflicts, not forgotten passwords, and resolve without any cracking tool.

#Bottom Line

Pick the path that matches what you actually forgot.

Worksheet-edit password on your own file: run the VBA macro in Step 3, Method A. It takes under five minutes on Excel 2021. If your IT team disabled VBA, use the ZIP-editor trick in Method B.

Workbook-open password on a Microsoft 365 file: start with account recovery at account.microsoft.com and check Version History in OneDrive before you reach for any cracker. If both fail, PassFab for Excel is the right starting point for a home user. Upgrade to Passware Excel Key if you need multi-GPU acceleration for a long password.

A truly random 15-character workbook-open password you have no partial memory of: restore from backup. AES-128 is doing its job.

#Frequently Asked Questions