How to Unlock a Word Document

There are two types of passwords for MS Office Word documents: a password for opening the file, and a password for modifying the document. These are two completely different ways to protect the document, respectively, they require different methods of unlocking the file.

Password to Open a Word Document

The only way to unprotect such a document that is locked with a user password is to enter the correct password. We remind you once again that there are no magic programs that could unprotect your Word file locked with a user password with a 100% guarantee. Anyone who claims the opposite will, at best, sell you a regular password recovery program (usually useless); in the worst case, it’s a scam.

So, our goal is to open a MS Word document protected with a password you forgot. As mentioned above, it is impossible to do this without the original password, but it is possible to recover this password (that is, guess it).

LostMyPass website was created specifically to help people who are in a similar situation. We search for the password you need among tens of billions of passwords, launch combined attacks and even brute force to help customers recover their original password. We cannot give a 100% guarantee of password recovery, but our statistics show that our work is successful in more than 60% of cases, and these are very, very good results.

Just upload your file to the Word Password Recovery page and follow further instructions.

Word Password Recovery

We recover weak passwords almost instantly and for free. Strong password recovery might take up to 24 hours and will cost a certain amount if it is a success, see the Prices page. Both old versions of MS Word (*.doc files) and new ones (*.docx files) are supported.

Password to Modify a Word Document

We are pleased to inform you that we can unlock your Word document with such password for free. Just upload your file to the Word Password Recovery and get a link to download an unprotected document.

Please note that LostMyPass unlocks only modern versions of MS Word (*.docx files). Older versions (*.doc files) are not supported.

How to Unlock MS Word Document on Your Own PC

Recovering a Password to Open a Word Document

If we are talking about a password for opening a document, then the principle of unlocking a document is the same. You must check a huge number of possible options in search of the original password. But keep in mind that the work that our cloud computing cluster does in 24 hours will be done by your home computer for months or even years. Moreover, you need to collect a huge database of real passwords.

For those who know the features and password recovery techniques, we suggest paying attention to the hashcat and John the Ripper tools. Both programs are free and work flawlessly. But you still need a lot of time and effort to recover the lost password.

There are many shareware programs that work on the principle of a single button. We cannot recommend any of them here because we cannot give you a guarantee that these programs will work properly on your equipment.

Unlocking a Password to Modify a Word Document

In this case, everything is quite simple. A modern *.docx file is, in fact, an ordinary Zip archive. You need to perform a few actions with its contents to unprotect the document. Just take the following steps.

Rename your foo.docx to foo.zip.
Unzip the foo.zip to the foo folder.
Go to the foo -> word folder.
Open the settings.xml file with any text editor you have (Windows’ Notepad is suitable).
Find and delete the w:documentProtection tag, that is the text starting with <w:documentProtection and ending with />
Now go back to the foo folder and zip all its content into a new foo_unlocked.zip archive.
Rename the foo_unlocked.zip file to foo_unlocked.docx.
If everything was done correctly, then the foo_unlocked.docx file will be an unprotected copy of your original document.

Legal Notes

Please note that we respect copyright and process applications for password recovery and removal only from the owner of this file. Before using the service, you must accept our Terms and Conditions.