How To Recover An Excel Password

First off, don't panic!

If you're like most people, you regularly use a handful of passwords (this isn't recommended but we're all human).

Slowly go through each of these passwords to check in case one of them lets you into the password protected spreadsheet.

If that doesn't work, you have a couple options:

1. Start typing in every possible password (a good cure for insomnia)


2. Get hold of some Excel password cracking software to do the job for you

The software will whiz through its own internal dictionary, which will get most passwords. If that fails, it will start what is known as a "brute force" attack, going through every possible combination of passwords. If it gets to that stage, go grab a cup of coffee. It could take a while.

Chances are that you'll be happy when the software gets your lost password but a bit scared that it managed to do it so fast.

Ideally, your password should contain a mixture of numbers, upper and lower case letters and punctuation symbols.

This combination is the hardest to crack.

Trouble is that it also means if you forget your password, you'll almost certainly need the help of some password cracking software.

If you need to generate a random password, there's a free website you can use here. You can choose how much protection your password will have.

Don't store your passwords anywhere they can be found by a potential thief. This means that storing all your carefully generated random passwords in a text file on your hard drive is not a good idea! Nor is writing them down in a notebook - although this can work for PIN numbers (some people I know use extra people in their phone book to store PINs. No-one will know which Dave or whoever isn't a real person!)

The best way to store your password details is in your head. So long as you're not ever going to forget them.

So for the rest of us, it's worth investigating a program that will run on your computer and act like a bank vault to keep all your passwords secure.

The best one I've found is My Security Vault. It's inexpensive, you can download it and run it immediately and it offers world class security - one of the ways you can tell this is that certain countries are banned from downloading it, which is only reserved for the highest levels of encryption.