Unhandled Perception
From the mind of a developer.

Sunday, September 03, 2006

Unprotect a protected Word document

  1. Open a protected document in MS Word
  2. Save as "Web Page (*.htm; *.html)", close Word
  3. Open html-document in any Text-Editor
  4. Search "-w:unprotectpassword-" tag, the line reads something like that: w:unprotectpassword-JSHDNW08-/w:unprotectpassword- (the dashes are used because HTML tag enclosures get removed from the blog posting)
  5. Keep this "password" in mind
  6. Open original document (.doc) with any hex-editor
  7. search for hex-values of the password (reverse order!)
  8. Overwrite all 4 double-bytes with 0x00, Save, Close
  9. Open document with MS Word, Select "Tools / Unprotect Document" (password is blank)

Found this a long time ago so I'm not sure who to give credit to.

Labels: , ,

posted by Veign at 2:34 PM

9 Comments:

  • or you could simply put it on a floppy disk. it takes the protection off instantly because its file system
    does NOT support it

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 2:30 AM EST  

  • ^^ That doesn't work with Word 2k3

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 1:51 PM EST  

  • Saving as xml is easier, find unprotectPassword setting and set to 00000000. For amusement, save the original value and put it back after making your changes before returning to the author.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 8:16 AM EST  

  • Big Help! Thanks!

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 10:40 AM EST  

  • The XML technique works great, 10x

    By Blogger Hernan, at 9:31 PM EST  

  • In WORD, press ALT + SHIT + F11 and look for the two lines:


    W:DocumentProtection....

    etc.

    ...../W:UnprotectPassword

    (the shift + "," caracter is not supoorted as plain text in this blog, but they are there when searching for these two lines, delete them too....)

    Delete these two lines, and save document.

    Open document again with WORD, and.... password is gone

    By Anonymous Twomuch, at 8:02 AM EST  

  • @TwoMuch - Very nice method and all a person needs ensure is they have Web Scripting installed.

    By Blogger Veign, at 10:27 AM EST  

  • I just saved it as web page, deleted the 'protect' line (no sign of "unprotectPassword" lines quoted to search for in my doc). Then opened htm created with word and did a save as Word and hey presto! Easy and no hex stuff that baffles me :) DE

    By Blogger D, at 9:00 AM EST  

  • Great tip thx

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 7:08 AM EST  

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