Remove the Password

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Remove the (unknown) password from a document protected for forms.

When you password protect a document against opening, then that document is encrypted and you will not be able to open it without the original password.

There are lots of people out there who purport to be able to crack passwords, but Word's protection is pretty good and does not come with any back doors, so while you can break the password eventually by trial and error using software that will try all possible examples, a suitably strong password will take a seriously long time to break. There is an example of such software listed on the favourites page of this site.

Then you have the dilemma of whether to offer your credit card details to someone who cracks passwords for a living.

Word documents protected for forms are not secure. You may not be able to readily discover the password, but you can easily remove it using the script editor.

Open the document in Word then press ALT+SHIFT + F11. The document will be opened in the script editor and will look something like:

From the edit menu - select FIND and search for 'password'

The search routine will take you to the area of the document where the password is stored -

The bit we are interested is the unique sequence of digits in the middle of that line, highlighted below in red.

<w:UnprotectPassword>5F23E53C</w:UnprotectPassword>

 

Note:

If you may need to replace the original password later, make a note of the sequence of digits before overwriting with zeros.

Overwrite the red digits with zeros.

<w:UnprotectPassword>00000000</w:UnprotectPassword>

Save the document from the script editor. Close the editor and you can unlock the fields without the original password from the forms toolbar