Passper for Excel

At the basis of every great enterprise, there will always be some people arduously working in Microsoft Excel. Sometimes, they will even be at the top. Over the years, the program has been used by many companies for strategic planning and accounting. The documents created with it are important so, naturally, Excel enables you to enforce some restrictions.

These can take the form of passwords used to prevent access to the whole document or the individual worksheets that it contains. I don’t aim to write corporate fiction in this review, but situations when a co-worker leaves a company and “forgets” and remove restrictions from a document are not unheard of.

What do you do if you find yourself in this situation? Well, you could try a program like Passper for Excel.

Firstly, Passper for Excel can recover a password that forbids you to open the document. To do this, you can choose between four decrypting methods, also called “attacks”. For example, the combination attack allows you to combine only the characters you choose in hopes of cracking the password. Use this method only if you are sure you know the characters of the passcode, but not their order.

If you know only some of the characters, use the mask attack, where you can also provide details like length, types of characters NOT included in the password, prefix and suffix (if you can remember them). There’s also the dictionary attack (which tries all the words from a dictionary until one matches) and the brute force attack (which takes a lot).

The program can also remove editing restrictions from a document’s workbook or individual worksheets. These can also be protected by passwords that are seemingly easier to remove.

Since the demo version doesn’t really allow you to remove or recover anything, I can’t really say how fast and efficient Passper for Excel is. I do, however, appreciate its simple design, intuitive interface and versatility.