Excel Password

Excel Password is a nifty little tool that recovers passwords to Excel 2007 files, as its name implies, through some simple steps. It does not require any special experience from the user and comes in handy if you have lost or forgotten XLS keys.

The app's interface is made from a standard dialog, where you can use a wizard to effortlessly carry out a recovery task.

Selecting an Excel spreadsheet is done via the file browser, since "drag and drop" is unsupported. Excel Password even provides a sample to help you test its capabilities.

There are two retrieval modes available - automatic or with user-defined options. The latter method requires you to input a file name for the recovery task (PWCX format), to select the attack mode (brute force, smart force or dictionary-based) and to write the beginning and ending of the password, if you have this information at hand.

It is possible to customize the character set (letters, digits, symbols), specify the password length and used language, as well as to determine the smart force acceleration factor or the dictionary-based method (e.g. plain search, stored passwords).

Before initializing the recovery procedure, you can run a benchmark to estimate speed values for total passwords per second and minute, as well as save the configuration properties to file for future projects.

Additional options of Excel Password let you view a history list and log details, calculate how long it takes to look for a password through brute-force attack mode, as well as disable logging and history recording.

The program runs on a low-to-moderate quantity of CPU and system memory, so it shouldn't put a strain on the computer's performance. It has a good response time and takes a reasonable amount of time to discover a password, depending on the parameters you set.

We have not experienced any problems throughout our evaluation, since the app did not hang, crash or pop up error dialogs. There's also a help file available. Thanks to its intuitive layout, Excel Password should satisfy the entire audience.