Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Technical Help and How To's Word 07 Password Protect

So yesterday I created three files that I password protected in Word 07. They were saved as docx files. The password for all three was the same.

Today none of them will open. Yesterday, the fourth wouldn't open but I'd barely started it so recreated it and replaced [and it did replace without requiring a password] so the new one is one of the three...

I would have had to transpose the same letter at least twice or something.

Does anyone have any thoughts? Any way around it? IIRC older versions of word had the 'preview' option when you were opening a file in Word and you could copy/paste from there, but that's not an option in 07.

One I'm not too terribly worried about. Another I still had open and resaved it as a non protected file so I have it, but the third... was about 10 pages of hard work

Hi Carol,

This is a long shot, but could you possibly have had the caps lock pressed when you created the passwords?

Another long shot - would you by any chance be using a system that gives you access to previous versions of files? Or do you create automatic backups?

If the password isn't too long (say, six characters or less), you could probably find a password cracking program online to "break into" your files. The longer the password, however, the more time it would take to succeed. And in case you were going to ask -- no, I don't know the names of any such programs.

Good luck,
Lynn

No, not caps lock. Not shift on the first letter instead of lower case. Have typed the password about 82 times into a word doc and tried all of the permutations that cropped up [transposed letters, b instead of g or whatever]. None have worked.

It's a 5 word, 16 letter phrase. Remembering it isn't a big deal so that it's long isn't an issue you know?

I normally do auto backups/autorecovery but apparently it's turned off in password protect files...

And yeah - no luck with any of the Googleed cracking options - at least not so far. Guess I'm going to have to attempt to recreate it...

/sigh/

Hi Carol!

16 characters could be the reason. The Word 2007 GUI has a bug. Some dialogs *) accept only 15 characters **), as was the norm in earlier versions. This means, only the first 15 characters got accepted as password, but the password input dialog for opening the document accepts all 16 characters. So, try entering just the first 15 characters and you should be fine. If luck holds out.

Michael

*) It's the dialog you get when using the Save > General Options to set the password. The one from Prepare > Encrypt document works just fine.

**) I reproduced this just now. And the funny thing is, it's only during the first time you set a password on the document that only the first 15 characters are accepted. After successfully opening the password-protected document, you can set a password with more than 15 characters just fine. /shudders/ This bug is truly nasty.

Michael -
I JUST figured that out!

WOOHOO!

Yeah - if it'll only let you input 15 characters, why does the 'enter password' box let you put in 16? I've spent several hours messing with it...

ARGH!

But yay!

I'm guessing the ones I did several weeks ago I did the other way this time I did the General options thing so...

Wow. What an odd and frustrating bug! I never password protect my files in Word, so I never came across the problem. (I do my password protection via the Cryptainer freeware program.)

Carol, I'm glad Michael was able to come up with the solution for you.

Joy,
Lynn

Glad it worked, Carol

Michael

Good to know about this bug in advance. I get constantly frustrated with Word 07. I could work in Word 03 with my eyes closed and with this version I've had such a hard time that I want to scream in frustration a lot of the time. I was used to the shortcuts of the 2003 version and when I use a shortcut now and it doesn't work I want to... ARGH!!!!! So I have to spend a lot of time hunting the icons because I don't find them where I think they would be. Macros that worked fine with Word 2003 doesn't work right in 2007. I hate it! It's so frustrating because I've always been fast to learn any new software but this new version baffles me most of time.

Sorry. I just had to vent my frustration... But I'm glad Michael came to the rescue and figured it out.

Andreia (back to work in Word 2007 :rolleyes: )