Bypassing security on a word document

One of the guys here at work had a word doc that was secured with a password and was not editable. After flexing some brain muscle. I came up with a quick and dirty trick to bypass words security and make a Word doc that was editable using Windows 7 wordpad.

This is a pretty simple trick to use and can be done by anyone with enough skills to hit File -> Save As.

Follow these steps to make a locked word doc editible again tested in Windows 7.

1. Simply open up the word doc that is password protected and not editible.
2. Go to File -> Save As and then save the file as a Rich Text Format document aka .rtf to your computer.
3. Close Word.
4. Open up the file using Wordpad.
5. In wordpad find the save as dialog and then save it back to a word doc

And that should be it.

This may not work in windows xp. I’m using windows 7 and office 2010.

Your mileage may vary.