Unprotect Excel Sheet

What this removes

Excel has five separate editing locks, and people hit them without knowing which one they have. This tool strips all of them in one pass:

• Worksheet protection. The one behind "The cell or chart you're trying to change is on a protected sheet."
• Workbook structure protection. Stops you adding, deleting, renaming, moving, or unhiding sheets.
• Window protection. Stops you resizing or rearranging the workbook's windows.
• Protected ranges. Individual cell ranges with their own passwords, separate from the sheet's.
• Read-only recommendation and write reservation. The prompt demanding a password before Excel will save your changes.

Your data, formulas, formatting, charts, pivot tables, and macros come back exactly as they went in. The only bytes that change are the lock settings themselves.

What it can't remove

A password required to open the file, unless you know it. That password encrypts the workbook's contents with AES. Without it there is nothing to read, let alone edit, and no tool can take it off. Drop the file in anyway and this tool will tell you that's what you have. If you do know the password, type it when asked: the file is decrypted in your browser, its editing locks come off, and the download has no password to open.

VBA project protection. The lock on viewing macro source code lives in a separate binary part of the file. This tool reports nothing about it and leaves it alone.

Sheet protection, workbook protection, and encryption are three different things

Most confusion here comes from Excel using the word "password" for all three.

The first three are settings recorded inside the file. The fourth changes the file into ciphertext. That is the whole difference, and it is why no tool can remove the fourth without the password.

How it works

An .xlsx file is a ZIP archive of XML documents. Sheet protection is one line in a sheet's XML, and the password you set is never stored: Excel keeps only a hash to check typed guesses against. Nothing in the sheet is encrypted by it.

So this tool opens the archive, deletes the specific elements that record each lock, and writes the archive back. It never rebuilds your workbook, which is why macro-enabled .xlsm files survive intact where a converter would strip them. Every other byte is passed through untouched.

All of that runs in your browser using JavaScript. Nothing is uploaded, so a confidential workbook stays on your machine.

Is this legal?

On a file you own or are authorised to edit, yes. The realistic cases are the common ones: a colleague protected a sheet and left the company, a template you built years ago, a workbook whose password was set once and never written down.

Sheet protection was designed to stop accidental edits, not to secure data against someone determined. Microsoft is explicit about this, which is why the password is stored as a hash rather than used to encrypt anything. Use this on files you have the right to change.

Questions