Length (number of characters) of protection password set in a sheet tab

[Alberto Alencar]

Hi everyone.. please comment if is there a way to know the length (number of characters) of the current protection password set in a sheet tab.

I know that a protection password set in a sheet tab can contain up to 255 characters.
I would like to know how to discover the number of characters (the length) of the current protection password set in a sheet tab.
I developed a macro that discover the password set up to 12 characters.
I already tested the macro and it works fine (with a password set and controlled by myself).
But it would take too long (months/years) to discover a password set by someone else.
If I knew the length of the current password I could adjust the macro to consider just the combinations for the exact length of the password.

 

[BobBridges]

I may be wrong, but I'd bet money it isn't possible. That's kind of the point of a password, after all, ie not to give clues to its nature. If you could figure out the length, and shorten the process of cracking the password, then... Well, after all, the it's supposed to take years (centuries, millennia) to crack a password. That's the goal, anyway.

 

[Alberto Alencar]

Thanks BobBridges for your comments.

I suspect you are correct.

I thought about helping my daughter who forgot the password protection she applied in a sheet tab years ago and do not remember any characteristic of it. She will have to recreate the whole content from scratch.

 

[Marc L]

As with a kid level Web search there are many solutions, even from this forum …​

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Remove password

A common request across the Excel forums is looking for some way to remove a password from the worksheet/workbook/VBA project. Take note, putting a password on any of these items does not make it secure, it only slows someone down from messing things up. With that mindset, here's the file I use...

chandoo.org