I recently saved a Microsoft Word 97 document in password-protected form, but I've forgotten the password. I need to access the data in this file, which would be difficult (and expensive) to recreate. How can I recover the file?
To recover your file, you need to use third-party password-recovery software designed specifically to recover Word documents. Such utilities include InterTek Electronic Commerce's WordLockSmith and Word ReadOnlyFix (available for the reasonable costs of $5 and $3, respectively, at http://www.intertek.org.uk/downloads) and Passware's Word Key (available for $40 at http://www.lostpassword.com/word.htm). Passware also makes password-recovery products for other Microsoft Office applications.
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Open the container wherein resides the document.
Right click the file.
Choose rename from the list.
Change the extension (the three letters after the dot[.] from doc to txt.
OPen the document in note pad.
Press CTRL - SHIFT and then right arrow once to highlight the first block of code in the document.
Copy it and then delete it.
Save the file and close it.
Open a new text file and paste the code you deleted into it. Call it code.txt and save it with your original document.
You can now change the original document's extension back to *.doc and open it with Word.
This workaroun works in every version of Word since 4.0. THis includes the latest and greatest.
WORD OF WARNING
You will lose the Formatting (headings and so on) with the first block of code removed. However, if you need to get the data, this is a small price to pay compared to the cost of having someone actually crack the file for you.
I speak from personal experience.
Hope this helps.
Andrew Martin June 24, 2002