The 5 best Microsoft Office file recovery tools

Protecting MS Office documents with strong passwords is a great idea. However, it is a headache when I cannot remember the password to open them. This article will introduce you to the 5 best MS Office file recovery tools.

Before going into the introduction of each tool, one thing you should keep in mind is that you should only use these tools to remove your own document password. When using it for other documents, this behavior may be considered illegal.

1. Free Word and Excel Password Recovery Wizard

Support: Microsoft Word and Excel 95-2003

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Free Word and Excel Password Recovery Wizard is the first tool users should consider when unable to remember passwords to open documents. Tool to unlock files using both brute force attack and dictionary attack. It has options to configure both types of attacks. Dictionary attack uses different case sizes with custom word lists, while brute force attack uses custom password lengths as well as custom character sets.

2. Word Password Recovery Master

Support: Microsoft Word and Excel 95, 97, 2000, XP, 2003, 2007 (the tool also claims support for both versions 2010, 2013)

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Word Password Recovery Master is another free option when you want to recover and remove passwords. It supports multiple versions of Microsoft Word and Excel.

However, the versions that this tool claims to support are not entirely accurate. In some tests, users found that the program could not recover or remove a simple password in Office 2010. Therefore, this tool may not be available in new versions of Office such as 2010, 2013.

However, passwords in Microsoft Office 2003 documents are easy to remove and restore. One thing to note is that this program also does not support custom encryption types, it can only remove and restore the default MS Office password.

3. Elcomsoft Advanced Office Password Recovery

Support: All Microsoft Office versions

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Elcomsoft's Advanced Office Password Recovery (AOPR) is a professional tool so you need to pay if you want to use it. For a price of 49 USD, Home Edition is the cheapest option. However, it does not allow the GPU to use to crack or remove passwords and only use the CPU (Home Edition is also limited to a single CPU). GPU is a more efficient cracker so if you want to use it you need to upgrade to Standard Edition with 99 USD.

AOPR also has many features, allowing the use of dictionaries, custom character sets and customizable password lengths. It also uses brute force attack technology. AOPR works on older versions of Microsoft Office as well as new versions.

4. CrackIt!

Support: Microsoft Word and Excel 97, 2000, 2003

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CrackIt! is an older cryptographic cracker, developed for Windows 95. However, it still works with Windows 10 and does not require installation and run as a simple executable program. The tool is quite simple, it only uses brute force attack techniques and limited dictionaries, but it can remove or recover passwords for old MS Word and Exce files.

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5. SmartKey Office Password Recovery

Support: All Microsoft Office versions

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The Office Password Recovery program of SmartKey is a paid tool. Just like the AOPR of Elcomsoft, if there is enough time this program can crack AES-128 key (as long as the key is not too difficult). In addition, the user interface is one of the most beautiful of all password crack tools and is very easy to use.

With the Standard version, users will have to pay 24.95 USD and are not allowed to speed up GPU. To be able to use this feature, you need to pay 34.95 USD for the Professional version to be able to increase to 32 CPU and 8 GPUs.

Certainly, there are many programs to crack passwords for other Microsoft Office documents. Most tools provide the same functionality as the above programs; Other payment options pay more but offer the same range of features. One thing users need to know is that you will not be able to crack all passwords, especially those using the latest MS Office encryption.

Hope you can choose the appropriate password removal tool from the list above. I wish you all success!

See more:

1. Instructions to remove passwords for MS Office files
2. Forgot password protected Excel file, what should you do?
3. Restore default settings in Word, Excel 2003, 2007, 2010, 2013