If you’ve ever had the misfortune to save afile in Microsoft Word, Excel or Access and protected it with a password “just to be safe” and then forgotten the password, you’re not alone – Password Studio can get you out of trouble…
Meeting up with password protected Microsoft Office files happens all the time. Usually at the most inconvenient moment.
Fortunately, Password Studio is a simple to use piece of software purpose built for this kind of problem.
How does Password Studio work?
It works in a very similar way to it’s cousin, PDF Password Recovery.
After you’ve downloaded the software, you select the type of file you want to recover the password from – Access, Excel or Word.
Then you select the actual file that has been protected by a password.
There are then two different options:
1. A dictionary using one of the two dictionaries supplied with the program. If you’re reasonably positive that your problem file has got an “easy” password then this is a good option.
2. A brute force attack. This is best when you know the person who saved the file was likely to have set a difficult-to-crack password. You can then select the character sets to use: upper case letters, lower case letters, numbers, symbols and spaces. Most passwords set by humans are likely to be letters and numbers. Sneaky passwords set by computers or sites like the random password generator could contain anything.
The dictionary attack is the quickest one to run and will get results most of the time. I found that the advanced dictionary gave me best results.
That said, it’s also very easy to set the program to test for every possible password combination using the brute force attack with your PC left running over lunch. Your choice, but by definition the brute force attack will recover your lost password without fail.
Verdict
With luck, Password Studio isn’t the kind of program you’ll need to use often.
But when you encounter an Access, Excel or Word file that stubbornly refuses to open without a password then this is a simple to use, affordable, password cracker program.
It’s available for immediate download and it cracked my test files in just a few minutes.