Karl B

The age old problem of, how do you remove the password off a Microsoft Word document when you don’t know the password!

At work today I found a fairly easy solution. In previous versions of Office (we’re using 2007) you could save a document as a .rtf file, reopen it and the protection would be gone. Unfortunately in Word 2007 it looks like they’ve added some meta data to the rtf file to prevent just that, also wordpad/rtf files did not retain all the formatting information which was a pain.

Anyway, the solution! Save your password protected document as a web page, edit the html file and remove the lines which looks like this:

<w:DocumentProtection>ReadOnly</w:DocumentProtection>
<w:UnprotectPassword>59D8CC1A</w:UnprotectPassword>

Save it, reopen it in Word, save it as a doc. Done! The great thing about this solution is that Word puts SO much formating data in the webpages (at a guess so they can be converted back) that you don’t lose any formatting like you would with the rtf route.