Passworded .doc file

b0bd0d

My sister gave me some old .doc file from about 2004 that the said she typed in word. She put a password on so nobody could open it but now she wants to open it and can't remember the password. I've found a bunch of shareware stuff that cracks it rather quick but I'm looking for some sort of freeware. Any hints?

Taximes

I've never messed with passwords on .doc files before, but can you open it in Notepad or Wordpad without the password?

It might be a little screwed up if it had a bunch of formatting, but it might be pretty clean and readable if it was just a bunch of plain text.

I imagine that would really go against the idea of password protecting it, but it's worth a shot, right? :P

b0bd0d

tried that. No love. Seems like there's a bunch of random weird text (who's WildBill and what's he doing in a doc?) in there tho. But no text that would have to do with what she wrote. It's encrypted for some reason.

snarks

This site has a suggestion for just working around the document, and it also has a link to a freeware program that can crack the document open if the other method doesn't work. I don't have MS Office on my computer, so I can't verify if this works or not.

http://itmanager.blogs.com/notes/2005/04/how_to_crack_un.html

thebovrilmonkey

Unless it's changed since last time I used it, Open Office ignores microsoft password protection.

Download it (it's free), open up the file then save it as a .doc again and it should strip the password off it.