Free Excel Password Recovery

Pros

• Offers three recovery modes
• Very easy to use, even for beginners
• Can find at least some passwords quickly
• Tiny installation footprint

Cons

• Can't recover all passwords
• Finding a complex password could take an extremely long time

Free Excel Password Recovery 2 is a software utility that can unlock secured Excel spreadsheets. It's useful in situations where users set a password and forgot it later on. Three different methods are employed by the app to unlock passwords, which offer a reasonable possibility of success when used together.

A basic brute-force attack is usually the first method that people will try. This attempts to unlock a spreadsheet by merely guessing a series of characters until the app is able to get in. Passwords that are only a few characters long are usually compromised in under an hour using this technique. While it's usually a bad thing that users have a tendency to rely on extremely insecure passwords, this is a rare instance where doing so can actually increase performance.

The password recovery can guess a three or four byte password in just a few minutes, which makes it extremely useful for those who have to get into files that have been sitting for sometime and may have been authored before an organization enforced better security practices. Those who might be contending with something more complicated can rely on a brute-force attack that adds a mask feature to increase the chances of correctly guessing a password. Codes that include special characters, like the star or pound signs, may only be recoverable using this method.

Dictionary attacks are also provided for situations where it's extremely likely that someone set a password based on a regular word that might be used in regular English-language documents. Though regular cleartext words can still take hours for Excel Password Recovery to find, the fact that it's onboard dictionary is so vast means that there's a high probability of the software eventually finding the right code to unlock a document.

Since the app has such a small installation footprint, many technicians will probably want to consider keeping a copy with them on their recovery file system. The interface is simple enough that people who don't have any cryptography background should still be able to use it. This simplicity is also a weakness in a way, since Free Excel Password Recovery 2 doesn't actually do any analysis of a document to find passwords. Rather, it simply guesses generated strings until it detects useful data.

Nevertheless, it doesn't use much in the way of processor cycles so there's no reason you couldn't just leave it to run in the background on a production machine. You shouldn't notice any lag in the process, so you can continue working like normal. Though Free Excel Password Recovery 2 certainly can't guess passwords quickly, it should come in handy as a last resort if you can't get into an important file.

Pros

• Offers three recovery modes
• Very easy to use, even for beginners
• Can find at least some passwords quickly
• Tiny installation footprint

Cons

• Can't recover all passwords
• Finding a complex password could take an extremely long time