Any way to crack a locked "workbook"

[FYRGUY47]

Hello everyone,

Using Excel 2002, I created a workbook with 30+ sheets/tabs. Each employee has a specific sheet that they are responsible for entering data which in turn reports back to sheet one labeled "Overview"

Each employee was instructed to protect their "sheet" when done and save the file to protect other users from changing their sheet.

I need to make changes to the workbook, however it is now locked so I am unable to add additional sheets/tabs to the workbook. My hunch is that someone protected the "workbook" instead of the "sheet" by accident. Poor training on my part...

Anyway, is there a way to unprotect the workbook again without knowing the password? I have tried to save it as a new file name and that didn't work.

Any help would be helpful... Thanks

 

[Gavona]

Google is your friend. Rather too easy to resolve your problem!

Gavin

 

[kjv1611]

Hmm, this gives some food for thought, not that I need any right now, but I think it's a good example of a good idea gone bad???

What I'm thinking is that it'd be best (in the future) to have so many different workBOOKS individually for the folks, basically like this....

1. Create a template workbook...
2. Any time you get a new person who needs it, just let 'em open the template..
3. All those workbooks feed data back to the "master" workbook..

advantages? No passwords required, so long as they are saving to their own personal network folder/drive - if that's an option...

Another option is to instead build a database - makes more sense to me anyway in the first place for multiple users... then you can set user-level permissions within the database, yadda yadda yadda... bye!

 

[FYRGUY47]

Gavona, Thanks for the thoughts. I did google it after you mentioned it and found a download to get in. I now have saved the workbook under my password. Thanks

kjv1611, This workbook is a basic budget sheet that we are using currently. each person has their own sheet and some of the information is controlled by the "Overview" sheet eg: budget amount for that sheet and name of person in charge of it, etc..

I am sure there are much better ways to track this but, I don't think a template will work for this application, although it is very possible I am not as familiar with the full potential of using a template. Thanks again!!

 

[Gavona]

Why don't you add the sheet passwords when you create the workbook?

Be aware that sheet passwords are even easier to crack! Though I am guessing your approach is entirely to stop accidental entries to the wrong sheet.

You could use VBA to very hide all worksheets except one that was determined by the userid and the overview. Close event would hide the worksheets.
Or the BeforeClose event could resave the workbook explicitly setting a nul password.......

Post in the VBA forum if that seems an option.




Gavin