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

We’ve all been in this situation – we have been ever so careful in protecting all of our sensitive documents by encrypting them with a password protection and then oops! We forget what the password is. Or alternatively we run a company and someone leaves without letting you know what password he or she used on their work, and now we can’t access the files they have saved. Not to worry, all is not lost as there are some very useful password recovery tools out there to help you.

Any kind of software costs money, but in this case the value of getting back important files far outweighs the minimal cost of the software itself.

A password recovery tool is essentially a type of software that helps your computer recover forgotten passwords. Of course these types of software should only ever be used in legal situations when you are the owner of the documents in question, they should never be used to try to get passwords to other people’s private information.

The software can be utilized to get passwords from many types of software programs  including Excel, Powerpoint, project and VBA passwords as well as Word documents, Zip folder passwords and Windows passwords.

Basically how the software works is that it will keep trying different combinations of numbers and letters until it finds the correct password. This is where you are either thankful that you picked a short password, as you will get results sooner, or you will have to wait a while for the  program to get through all the combinations until it finds your long, obscure password. If your passwords are very long and complicated there is a chance that you will not get results with this method.

A second way that password recovery tools use to gain access to your files is called a dictionary attack. In this scenario the software program attempt passwords by using words from the dictionary to try to find the word you used to protect your file. The search can also be adjusted to add symbols and numbers if you think that your lost password may have used them.

There are also other password recovery tools that simply disable the password protection on all files and folders on your computer or network. This is of course not the best option, since it will leave everything on your computer vulnerable, but if the other methods of trying to gain access do not prove successful then you may have to take this route to get results.

Of course, after all is said and done you will have learned the following valuable lessons:

1. Choose passwords that are easy for you to remember, but not obvious to everyone else
2. If you can’t remember your passwords, write them down in a safe place
3. Make your passwords long (12-15 characters) and use a mix of letters, numbers and symbols to ensure that someone else can’t use a password recovery tool to gain access to your important files.

It would be best if no one ever had to endure the experience of having to use software to recover their password protected files, but at least it is possible to do if necessary.  Next time try to be more careful to keep track of your passwords, or have departing employees provide their passwords before they leave the company with them.