Protect Your Excel Spreadsheets with Passwords

There are many reasons why you would want to protect your documents using passwords. Since, most of us use Microsoft Office products for creating word files, spreadsheets, and presentations, among others, protecting our files that are created using MS Office is a very critical security need. Your Excel files could carry important and sensitive data like projections and sales figures that can be of immense use to our competitor, and losing your files to them might affect your business negatively. Creating an excel password is also helpful if you want only the persons designated by you to have access to the files, and to stop others from accessing them. You can also create passwords to share a work file within a group, and allow the rights of modifying to others within the group. You might also want to protect your Excel file to ensure that no one else reads the Excel file you send through email.

How do you usually protect your Excel file using passwords? If you want to assign a password to your file to simply protect your file and prevent others from accessing it; you have to use the Save As options in the File menu and enable the password protect option found there. If you use a single password, your protected file can only be opened by you or someone who knows your password. If you want someone to have rights to modify your Excel file apart from accessing it, you can enter a separate modify password and give it to someone with whom you want to share the modifying rights. This is useful if a group of people are working on the same project and need to enter data individually from time to time. Similarly, you can also protect VBA modules, and entire workbooks and worksheets.

Protecting your Excel file is necessary and is a great option to ensure security for your file, as long as you don’t lose your password. If you lose your password, recovering your password might be tough, and there aren’t many things you can do to get it back other than trying few simple steps. You can try different combinations of passwords you use (most people try this, anyway), or try to use methods Brute Force Attack, Smart Force Attack, or Dictionary Search; but, these methods don’t work if your excel files are versions 2003 and 2007. All excel versions through 1995 were not that secure, and recovering passwords for Excel versions until 95’ are easy. Both, Office 2000 and XP, have high security levels with solid data encryptions, and recovering passwords can be a tad difficult on these versions using conventional methods.

If you are among the many that have lost their passwords and have tried all methods at your disposal, but you’re still not able to recover your password; don’t despair, you have help from software that can help you crack the encryption code and recover your password. Invest in a password breaker/cracker tool that can help you recover passwords, not just on your Excel files, but on all MS Office applications, which have password-protect features on them. Remember, forgetting passwords is quite natural, most of us do that, but not having a sound back up plan to recover the passwords is foolhardy. So, invest in a password recovery tool, today.