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Have you ever come across a word or excel document that was ‘password protected’ – where certain parts of the document you were unable to edit?
Frequently these are used in business settings, and with good reason – to protect formulas, proprietary information, sections of contracts, et cetera.
1. Ensure your file is in the latest .docX or .xlsX format. If your file is in an earlier office format, do a ‘Save As’, select ‘docx’ as the format type, and make sure you leave the ‘maintain compatibilty’ box empty. We want the latest file format.
2. Open windows explorer and find your file. Make a copy of the file, and change the file extension from .docx to .zip.
3. Right click the .zip file, and using the 7zip context menu, ‘Open Archive’ using the 7zip archive manager. This will allow you to edit the .docx archive without extracting the XML files inside.
4. Navigate to /word, and find the settings.xml file. Right click the file, and select ‘edit’. – This is important, do not choose ‘open’ or any other option – only ‘edit’ will work.
5. Find the XML element beginning with w:documentprotection, highlighted in the screenshot above. Remove the entire element, including   brackets.
6. Save, close, and update the archive when prompted.
7. Rename your file, changing the .zip extension back to .docx
Hopefully this has assisted someone out there in Atlanta, and let us know if this solved your IT support needs in the comments!
Thanks to this post on Spiceworks, and this helpful blog : http://itintheory.blogspot.com/2012/06/remove-editing-restrictions-in-word.html for the inspiration.
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