How to Bypass MS Word 2016-2007 Open Password and Edit Password

Microsoft Office software allows you to create passwords to protect a Word document. Passwords effectively prevent unauthorized users from gaining access to the Word document and making changes to it. But on the other hand, password is something that's easy to forget. If you forgot the password and can't open or edit the Word document, it will be very frustrating, especially when the Word document contains important stuff. Fortunately, there are a few ways you can bypass Word document password, whether the Open password or Edit password.

• Part 1: How to bypass password to open Word document
• Part 2: How to bypass password to edit Word document

How to bypass the password to open Word document

If you want to open a password protected Word document but you don't have the password or you forgot it, to tell you the truth, there is no way you can bypass the password. But luckily, a Word password recovery program can help find the original password to open your Word document. Here we recommend the iSumsoft Word Password Refixer because it really works and guarantees that you won't lose any of your data. Here are the steps.

Step 1: Install and then launch the iSumsoft Word Password Refixer on your computer.

Step 2: Click on the Open button, then navigate to the password protected Word document, and select it to import it into the password recovery program.

Step 3: Choose one recovery type from Normal, Mask, Dictionary, and Smart.

Tips: How to choose the recovery type depends on how much about the password you know or remember. Simply put, you need to tell the program as much information as possible, including the password range, length, etc., so that it can help you find the password faster. For example, I remember that my password contains three characters and the last character is 3, so I choose Mask, and set the Mask as ??3, as shown in the screenshot below.

Step 4: After the settings, click on Start button to start searching for the password. If you made the settings correctly, the Word password will be found and displayed on the screen.

How to bypass the password to edit Word document

If you can’t edit the Word document because it's restricted editing with a password and you forgot the password, you must want to bypass the password. Luckily, it's easy to bypass Word Edit password and all you need is the 7-ZIP software or any other ZIP/RAR software installed on your computer. Here are the steps you can take to bypass Word Edit password using ZIP software.

Step 1: Check the Word file name extension and make sure it’s .docx. If its extension is .doc, just open the document and do "Save As" to save it as .docx format.

Step 2: Change the .docx extension into .zip extension, and when prompted, just make sure you want to change it.

Step 3: Open the .zip file with 7-ZIP or any other ZIP software installed on your computer, and then open the word folder inside it.

Step 4: Right-click on the "settings.xml" file and select "Edit".

Step 5: Open the "settings.xml" file with "Notepad", then find the documentProtection tag and delete the entire element including the < and > brackets.

Tips: You can firstly press Ctrl + F to open the Find dialog, then type Protection and click on Find Next so that you can quickly find the documentProtection tag.

Step 6: Save the modified "settings.xml" and close it. When prompted to update this change in the archive, click OK.

Step 7: Close the ZIP archive. Now, you've successfully bypassed the Word Edit password. Change the extension from .zip back to .docx. Open the Word document and you can make changes to the content without any restrictions.

Tips: This method works when the Word document is restricted editing with a password. However, a Word document can be locked or restricted editing by some other ways. For more details, look at this page: How to Edit a locked Word document without password.

In all, you don't have to worry when you can't open a password protected Word document without the Open password or can't edit the content of a Word document without the Edit password. It should be a very easy task to bypass the two types of passwords in the Microsoft Word document.