Unprotect Excel
Sheet and workbook protection removed here in the tab — with every locked sheet named before anything changes, and nothing else in the file touched.
Runs in your browser0 bytes uploadedDrop a protected workbook here
.xlsx or .xlsm — it is opened in this tab and never uploaded
Unprotect Excel sheets without the password
The situation is nearly always the same one. The workbook is yours — inherited from somebody who left, handed over when a role changed, or locked by you personally at some point in the last decade — and the password went wherever such things go. You can see every number on the screen. You simply cannot type in the cells.
Drop that file on the box above and each tab is listed by its real name, marked according to whether it carries a lock. Tick what you want opened, take the download, and carry on. The password is not recovered, guessed at, or brute-forced, because none of those things turn out to be necessary. Understanding why is genuinely useful, and it takes one paragraph.
Sheet protection is a sign, not a lock
Microsoft are unusually direct about this in their own documentation for protecting a worksheet, in a box headed Important: "Worksheet level protection isn't intended as a security feature. It simply prevents users from modifying locked cells within the worksheet." That sentence is the whole story. The feature was built to stop a colleague typing over a formula they meant only to read, and it does that job well.
Mechanically it is a single element sitting in the XML that describes your sheet. There is a hash of the password in that element, but nothing whatsoever is encrypted with it. Its only purpose is to give the spreadsheet application something to compare a typed password against. Delete the element and there is no longer anything to compare against, so the restriction is gone. Nobody has broken anything; a note asking for care has been taken down. Your numbers were never behind a cryptographic wall in the first place.
What a workbook actually is
| Full name | Office Open XML Workbook |
|---|---|
| Extension | .xlsx |
| Format type | Spreadsheet — a ZIP archive of XML parts |
| MIME type | application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet |
| Full name | Office Open XML Macro-Enabled Workbook |
|---|---|
| Extension | .xlsm |
| Format type | Spreadsheet — the same ZIP as .xlsx, plus a VBA project |
| MIME type | application/vnd.ms-excel.sheet.macroEnabled.12 |
The other kind of password, and why the difference decides everything
There is a second thing people also call an Excel password, and it is not remotely the same. If a file demands a password before it will even open — before you glimpse a single cell — then the workbook has been encrypted with AES, and what sits on your disk is a container of scrambled bytes. Such a file is not a zip archive at all. No element can be removed from it because nothing inside is readable until the correct password decrypts it. That case is genuinely impossible without the password, for this page and for every other.
From the outside these two look identical: both are called protection, both throw up a password box, both leave you stuck. Google's own summary of this problem ends by asking you which one you have, because the advice diverges completely and it has no way to tell. This page does not need to ask. The two cases differ in the file's opening bytes, so the moment you hand a workbook over it is identified and named on screen — before any work begins, and rather than after a run that quietly failed.
Why the manual method is harder than it reads
Search this problem and you will be shown a nine-step routine: copy the file, rename it to .zip, open the archive, dig into a folder, pull out a sheet, edit it in a plain text editor, delete a tag, put it back, rename it again. The routine is correct. It is also where most attempts stall, for reasons that have nothing to do with competence.
Windows hides file extensions by default, so step two fails silently for a great many people. The sheets inside are named sheet1, sheet2 and so on, and those numbers do not correspond to your tab names — the mapping lives in a separate relationships file, so finding the sheet called Payroll means opening several and guessing. Notepad renders the contents as one endless line. And putting a modified file back into an archive behaves differently in Explorer than it does in a real archiving tool, which is how people end up with a workbook that refuses to open at all. This page performs the same edit, resolves the tab names properly, and rebuilds the archive correctly.
Everything else in the workbook is left exactly alone
A tool that removes a lock and damages the spreadsheet is worse than no tool, so the rewrite is deliberately narrow. Only the individual parts holding a protection flag are modified. Every other part of the archive is copied over in its existing compressed form, never unpacked and never re-encoded. Your styles, number formats, shared text, cached formula results, charts, images and any embedded binaries therefore cannot be altered on the way through, since nothing in the process so much as reads them. The receipt names the count of parts rewritten against the total, so the scale of the edit is visible rather than promised. Once it is open, converting the sheets to CSV orturning them into SQL inserts works normally again.
What this page will not do
It will not open an encrypted workbook, for the reason given above. It will not unlock a VBA project either: macro code lives in its own binary with a separate locking scheme entirely, and a macro-enabled workbook processed here comes back with its sheets open and its code precisely as it arrived. If that project was locked, it remains locked, and the tool says so on screen when it spots one instead of letting you find out later. It also will not read a pre-2007 .xls, which stores everything as binary rather than as XML — for those, a quick Save As in any spreadsheet application produces something this page can work with.
Nor does it check whether the workbook belongs to you, which would require knowing things no web page can know. What can be said honestly is the point already made: a protected sheet was never a security boundary, and Microsoft say as much themselves. The people this page helps are overwhelmingly people locked out of their own past decisions.
Why the file stays on your machine
Consider what a locked workbook usually contains. Somebody bothered to restrict it, which makes it salaries, margins, a client list, a model with assumptions in it worth arguing about. Handing that to an unknown server in exchange for removing a flag is a poor trade, and it is precisely what the commercial results for this search ask you to do — the first instruction on those pages is to upload.
Here the mechanism removes the need. A workbook is a zip archive full of XML, your browser can already decompress and recompress zip data natively, and deleting an element from a string of markup is something JavaScript has always been able to do. All three steps happen in this tab, on the copy of the file your own machine already holds, and the finished archive is assembled in page memory before the download link points at it. No server is involved because none is required — leave the Network panel open while you work and you can watch that for yourself.
Questions
How do I unprotect an Excel sheet if I forgot the password?
Drop the workbook on the box above. Every sheet is listed with whether it is locked, you tick the ones you want opened, and the file comes back with the protection gone. The password is never needed and never guessed at, because sheet protection does not encrypt anything — it sets a flag inside the file, and the flag is simply removed.
Is this cracking the password?
No, and the distinction is worth understanding rather than glossing over. A protected sheet carries a hash of the password, but nothing in the workbook is encrypted with it. The hash exists only so the spreadsheet application has something to compare a typed password against. Take the element away and there is nothing left to compare against, so the sheet is simply open. No password is recovered, guessed or computed at any point — the hash is never even read.
What if the file asks for a password before it will open at all?
Then it is genuinely encrypted, and this page cannot help you — nor can any other site, whatever it claims. That kind of protection scrambles the whole workbook with AES, so there is no flag sitting there to remove. The two cases look identical from the outside, which is why the file is checked the moment you drop it: an encrypted workbook is not even a zip archive, and it says so on the first eight bytes. You are told which case you have before anything else happens.
Will my formulas, formatting and data survive?
Yes, and not as a hope — as a consequence of how the file is handled. Only the parts holding a protection flag are rewritten; every other part of the archive is copied across still compressed, byte for byte, without ever being unpacked. Styles, shared strings, cached formula results, charts, images and embedded binaries therefore cannot be altered on the way through, because nothing reads them. The receipt tells you exactly how many parts were rewritten so you can see how little was touched.
Does it work on a .xlsm with macros?
The sheets, yes. The VBA project, no. A macro-enabled workbook stores its code in a separate binary with its own locking scheme, which is a different problem from sheet protection and not one this page solves. Your macros come back exactly as they went in — unaltered and, if they were locked, still locked. The tool says so on screen when it finds one rather than leaving you to discover it later.
Why should I trust a website with a spreadsheet I had locked?
You should not have to, which is why you are not asked to. The workbook is opened, edited and rewritten by JavaScript running in this tab, and the download is assembled in the same place. A protected workbook is by definition something somebody wanted kept private — payroll, pricing, a client list — so the version of this task that involves handing the file to a stranger is the wrong version of it, no matter how convenient. Watch the Network panel while you work if you want to confirm it.
What does sheet protection actually protect against, then?
Accidents, mostly. Microsoft says so plainly in their own documentation, in a box marked Important: "Worksheet level protection isn't intended as a security feature. It simply prevents users from modifying locked cells within the worksheet." It stops a colleague typing over a formula they meant to read. It was never designed to keep a determined person out of a file they already have, and treating it as though it were is how people end up locked out of their own work.
The workbook opens but I cannot rename or reorder the tabs. Is that the same thing?
Different lock, same kind of flag. That one is workbook structure protection, and it lives in the workbook part rather than in any individual sheet, which is why unprotecting every tab can leave it in place. It gets its own switch above, listed separately from the sheets so you can see it is there and decide about it on its own. A file can have one, the other, both, or neither.