PassCue for Excel

Since the majority of the world’s companies use Microsoft Excel for accounting, statistics, strategic planning and other important tasks, it’s only natural that the popular application offers a few security features for protecting documents. Firstly, a user can set up an open password, which prevents others from accessing a document, unless they know the code.

Secondly, passwords can be set even inside the document, either to protect individual worksheets or the whole workbook. But passwords can be forgotten, just like the XLSX files containing older but important records. So what do you do when you need to open a document with a password that no one in your company remembers? You start looking for password cracking software, of course.

PassCue for Excel is, simply put, nothing out of the ordinary. It can either recover a user password for a document or remove the passwords from inside a document (those that protect the workbook or the worksheets). The interface is very user-friendly, so you probably won’t have any trouble navigating through its simple commands.

In order to recover a much needed open password, PassCue for Excel does exactly what all the applications of its kind do: it makes you select and attack type. Like in most cases, there are three available methods.

The dictionary attack will try words from a very long list (that’s usually kept in a TXT file) until one of them opens the document. Of course, this method will only work if you know for sure that the password is an English word. If you’re not, but still remember a few vague details about the password, try the brute-force with mask attack, where you can provide information like password range, prefix or suffix.

Finally, if you really don’t know anything about the password, just use the brute force attack, which will try anything to recover the code, but will take longer. Even if I haven’t managed to test the program properly (due to demo restrictions), it’s safe to say that PassCue for Excel works just fine, just like the many other password-removal apps of its kind.