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Remove Protection From Excel Worksheet Or Workbook. No password. No Problem.
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Jun 22, 2025
In this Excel tutorial I share with you how to remove protection from your Excel worksheet or workbook even when you do not know the password. No password= No Problem. I will walk you step by step how to remove the password protection My Excel Playlist is below. Excel Tips Playlist https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEu0c1pZOWXEg8N8SuHfQo0zyDhUSqp3Q Subscribe and watch more videos that help you use Microsoft Excel. / @howtoexcelatexcel Be Social & Let's Connect ++Website http://www.howtoexcelatexcel.com ++Twitter / howtoexcelatex.
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0:00
hi everyone my name is Barbara Welcome
0:01
back to my YouTube channel Today I'm
0:03
going to show you how to get around a
0:04
problem that I think you probably have
0:06
and I know I have and I have many a time
0:09
locking yourself out of your worksheet
0:12
or your workbook You need to update it
0:15
and you've forgotten the password Well
0:16
today I'm going to show you how to get
0:18
around that Let's get started So this is
0:20
the example we're working with It is my
0:23
order form for the Excellent Food
0:25
Company And what I want what I want to
0:27
do is I want to update this logo And I
0:30
also want to remove this worksheet
0:33
here to make things look a little neater
0:36
But as you can see I'm already getting
0:38
some errors here because I have these
0:41
cells locked And I also have protected
0:43
the workbook So I can't make any changes
0:46
to the structure of it But I can't
0:48
remember the
0:49
password So we're in a bit of trouble
0:52
But we're not really because there is a
0:54
way around both of these things So if
0:56
you need to see if
0:59
your Excel workbook has protection on it
1:02
if you go to the review
1:04
tab and if you click on here unprotect
1:08
sheet it'll prompt for a password And
1:10
with regards the workbook it will prompt
1:13
for a password also So what do we do
1:17
well first of all I'm just going to shut
1:18
down this And the second thing I'm going
1:20
to do is make a copy of my workbook
1:23
Always good practice to do that if
1:25
you're going to be working on something
1:26
you haven't done before or if it's an
1:28
important document We're going to do
1:29
something a little bit different here
1:31
And I need to see the file extension
1:34
because we're going to actually change
1:35
the file extension on this file So if I
1:37
go to
1:38
view show and file name extensions I can
1:43
see correctly that this is an Excel SX
1:46
file So what we want to do is actually
1:50
rename this
1:51
file and it's the extension I want to
1:54
change
1:55
to
1:57
zip You'll get a warning to say it's
2:00
going to become unstable We're okay Go
2:02
ahead and accept this And that changes
2:04
this file to a zip file Okay So I'm
2:09
working on my copy of my original
2:12
workbook and it's called zip now So
2:16
let's double click and open it And what
2:18
you'll find is all the different
2:19
components of that Excel
2:21
workbook Go into Excel and we actually
2:25
are looking at the worksheets at the
2:28
moment because there's protection on
2:30
sheet one which I want to remove So I'll
2:33
click
2:35
worksheets
2:36
And what I'm going to do is I'm going to
2:39
take a copy I'm going to take a copy of
2:42
the
2:43
XML file for sheet one And I'm just
2:46
going to pop that on the
2:48
desktop to work with to work with I'm
2:51
going to open that with Notepad You
2:55
maybe didn't expect to see all of that
2:57
code but we're only going to deal with
2:59
one very small part of it And if your
3:02
file looks a little bit more like this
3:05
when you open it go to the view menu and
3:09
hit WordP
3:13
So hit Ctrl F and the first thing we
3:16
need to do is find the area of the
3:20
worksheet that's protected We can do
3:22
this by hitting Ctrl F and typing
3:27
sheet
3:29
protection and that takes us to this
3:32
area here So between these two brackets
3:37
So this is the area that we need to
3:38
remove to remove the worksheet
3:41
protection Just to point out if you want
3:43
to put this worksheet protection back
3:45
just take a note of where this is and
3:46
you can paste it somewhere and pop it
3:48
back in I'm happy enough to delete
3:50
it I've deleted that protection And then
3:54
I'm just going to hit file and save
3:58
Let's out of it I'm then going to put
4:01
this back into
4:13
the XML file It of course gives us a a
4:15
warning that I'm going to copy and
4:18
replace the file that's already there
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I'm happy to do that Let's just hit okay
4:23
So that should have taken the protection
4:25
off sheet one We've also got protection
4:28
on the actual structure of the workbook
4:30
because I wanted to be able to delete
4:33
sheet two So we can do the same thing
4:36
It's actually this file here workbook
4:39
There's only one of those because this
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is to do with the workbook as opposed to
4:43
the worksheets which there could be
4:45
multiples of So let's just take a copy
4:48
of
4:49
this and pop this on the desktop Let's
4:53
open that with notepad
4:55
again Let's make it a bit bigger and hit
4:59
F
5:00
um instead of sheet
5:04
protection it's work group protection
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And that takes us to this area It's a
5:11
similar process as before You're looking
5:13
for the start of the bracket and then
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the end of the
5:17
bracket for the workbook
5:20
protection I'm happy enough to delete
5:22
that As I say if you want to save that
5:25
and pop that right back where you found
5:27
it once you've made your changes feel
5:31
free to do so Let's save that X out
5:35
again Let's put this back
5:40
into our Excel file Copy and
5:46
replace Let's go back to the file The
5:51
last thing we need to do is rename this
5:54
back to an
5:58
XLSX Hit Yes I'm happy to do that So
6:01
here's the moment of truth So the first
6:04
thing I wanted to do is change this
6:06
header So if I click into it now it's
6:09
worked I can
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actually change that That was the area
6:14
of the protection Now let's go to the
6:18
worksheet
6:20
And I want to delete it Or I can add one
6:22
in So that's worked too So let's
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just save that for now and X out of it
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If I just show the original again I
6:34
couldn't go
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in And let's just open up the copy where
6:38
we adjusted those files I can easily go
6:42
in and I can edit this area So that's
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the end of the tutorial I hope you find
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it useful if you have forgotten your
6:52
passwords for your worksheets for your
6:54
workbook protection If you did like the
6:57
video give it a thumbs up leave a
6:59
comment ask a question I answer all
7:01
questions in the comments below And
7:04
consider subscribing It really does help
7:06
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7:07
and you'll be notified when I record a
7:09
new video Hopefully See you next time
7:12
Thanks for watching