How to Unlock an Excel Sheet Yourself
Sometimes users cannot afford to upload their files to extraneous services. This may be dictated by the security policy of the company or the presence of confidential data in the table. We perfectly understand you, and therefore we share with you a simple instruction on how to independently unprotect an Excel document.
A modern MS Office document is, in fact, an ordinary Zip archive (only documents protected by a password for opening are an exception). You can remove protection from an Excel document simply by making small changes to the contents of the archive.
Assume that your file is called foo.xlsx. Follow the instructions below.
1. Rename your foo.xlsx file to foo.zip. For verification, simply open this file in any archiver such as WinZip or WinRar; if the file opens and you see a list of files and folders, then we are on the right track.
2. Unzip the contents of the archive into the foo folder.
3. Go to the xl -> worksheets folder.
4. Open sheetXX.xml files one after another in any text editor (Windows Notepad is suitable).
5. In the contents of each file, find the XML tag sheetProtection, and delete it entirely; that is, delete a piece of text starting with <sheetProtection and ending
with />
6. When all the sheets have been edited, go to the root of the foo folder and save all its contents to the foo.zip archive.
7. Now rename foo.zip to foo.xlsx.
If everything was done correctly, then the Excel file should open, the protection of its sheets should be removed.
