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Unlock a VBA password protected Excel file

By , on , tagged: 🏷️Windows  🏷️Office 

Unlock a VBA password protected Excel file

##(怎样解除受VBA密码保护的Excel文件)

Ever felt the need to open a VBA protected excel file… maybe one of your old files that contained an excellent routine! How do you come out of that pain?

当你想要打开一个VBA加密的文件。这篇文章可能会帮助到你。。

Important: This article is for educational purposes. Try this method for opening ONLY your own files, as I did too!

(只能用于测试自己的文件!!)

以下是正文内容。这些英文比较简单。只翻译一些主要步骤。其他就自己看吧。

So how does Excel store the file contents – cell data including formulas and formats, conditional formatting, VBA code, etc. etc. Lets investigate.

Create a new Excel file MyTest.xlsm and enter some dummy test data in the first sheet. (先新建一个xlsm文件。)

Add some formulas and conditional formatting (if you want to really understand the details).)(自己输入一些内容)

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Let us now see how excel stores this data in the file.

Open the file in notepad or a hex editor.(用记事本打开该文件,推荐用notepad++)

Did you notice the first 2 characters? “PK”. (前两字“PK”)

So Excel compresses its file contents. Now we know why there is not much difference if you compress an Office 2007 file.

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Lets look into the compressed contents. Rename the file extension from .xlsm to .zip。(改文件后缀为zip)

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Open the MyFile.zip file. (打开改后缀后的文件)

Wow! its an extensive structure with xml files to store the workbook, worksheets, calculations, sharedstrings, etc.

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This is how the XML of the Sheet1 looks

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Lets explore more. Lets go back to our original file and add some VBA code to it.

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Add a password and protect the VBA code.(添加个VBA密码)

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Save the file and redo the same steps as earlier to open the xml file structure.

We now have another XML file called vbaProject.bin.(之前的xml文件都变成了个vbaProject.bin)

This is the file that I need to recover.

Lets investigate further.

Open this file “vbaProject.bin” in a Hex Editor (there are lots of free ones out there… the one I use is Hex Editor Neo

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(用 Hex Editor Neo打开文件 “vbaProject.bin”)



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