Office Password Recovery - MS Word, Excel, MS PowerPoint, Access, and Outlook

Most of us these days are aware of the fact that our electronic data is not safe. Anyone on the web with a little know-how could access our computer over the Internet and get into our files. To keep our electronic data safe it is important to remember to password protect your MS Office documents. Password protecting documents takes very little effort and will prevent important or sensitive files from falling into the wrong hands.

Anyone who keeps financial data such as credit card or bank account numbers should ensure they password protect their documents. Additionally, if you work in an office and handle sensitive information about your company or any of your clients these documents should be protected as well. Doing so can save you a lot of trouble should the files fall into the wrong hands.

There is one small downside to password protecting your documents – what happens if you lose the password to a file? While you probably like to write down the passwords to your documents somewhere, this is not very safe as someone could find them and all your documents would be at risk. At the same time if you don’t write them down you run the risk of losing all your important data if you forget the passwords associated with the files.

Luckily there are programs out there which are designed to help you recover your files should you forget the password. These programs, referred to as password recovery software, work in a few different ways to figure out what password you used.

Initially the program will try to open your document using a combination of letters and number to see if it can ‘guess’ the right password. This may work to gain entry into your files, but if you used a long or complicated password that includes a variety of characters and symbols it may not succeed.

The second method is to go through the dictionary systematically and again try to hit on the right word. Most programs will allow you to customize your search and add numbers or symbols within the password if you know that is how you structured it.  If neither method has success, then the software can try to disable the password protection on the file itself instead of trying to find the password.

While there are many software programs offered for free, most people will have little success in getting these programs to access their files. Investing a few dollars will get you a much more streamlined program that will give you a much better chance of accessing your file, and in less time.

Password recover software can be used on many different types of files and even Windows itself, should you forget how to access your computer. Remember that you should only be using password recovery software to access your own files, as using it to open someone else’s documents is illegal.

The next time you are password protecting your documents, consider opening a secure document and saving your passwords in there, then make sure that the password you place on that document is 1) easy to remember and 2) complicated enough that a software recovery program couldn’t open it. Then you won’t have to worry about lost passwords or unprotected files.