Unlocking VBA Scripts

[jim wood]

Guys,

The company I work employed some consulants a couple of years ago and they built some good stuff in excel. The consultancy no longer exists and we want to make changes to the underlying VBA. The problem we have is that the VBA is password protected and they never left us with the passwords. Does anybody know if there is a way round this?

We are usig Excel 2003 SP2

Many thanks,

Jim.

[Alan Kirk]

The company I work employed some consulants a couple of years ago and they built some good stuff in excel. The consultancy no longer exists and we want to make changes to the underlying VBA. The problem we have is that the VBA is password protected and they never left us with the passwords. Does anybody know if there is a way round this?

No easy way around it I'm afraid, Jim. (As in, unlike breaking worksheet or workbook protection, a few lines of code won't do it.)

I suggest that you take a look at this page on JE McGimpsey's site:
http://www.mcgimpsey.com/excel/fileandvbapwords.html

and this one on Chip Pearson's:
http://cpearson.com/excel/password.htm

Now I've never used any of the products / services either; I downloaded a demo of one a few years back which promised to return the first two characters of the password, and it did, without fail. (Can't recall the name of it now.) So some of these apps will clearly work, though you have to pay a few bucks for them.

[lotsaram]

Workbook and worksheet passwords are trivial to crack with VBA once the workbook is already open, however the workbook open and VBA module passwords have much stronger encryption and can only be cracked with brute force. There is software out there to break the passwords which Alan has provided links to but depending on the strength of the password and the algorithm the program uses it might still take hours and hours to break the password.

The company might not exist any more but why not call one of the consultants and ask for the password?

[Wim Gielis]

Hi

I have a program to convert the VBA password into another password (that you know then). It cannot (or won't) tell you the previous password. If interested, leave me a PM Jim.

Wim