FOAK - Excel password removal?

I have a couple of password protected Excel 2003 documents that I can't
open.
I've seen "excel key" that will do the job of brute forcing the password for
$60 but being a cheapskate I'd like to get this done for free if at all
possible.

Any suggestions?

 

I've been down this road myself a couple of times and never found a
satifactory solution.

 

If you have a rought idea of the password, there are some free password
crackers that will give you the first 2 or 3
letters, (the idea being you pay for the full version)
Don't have a link, but if you have a rough idea, could be worth a google.

 

I found quite a few trial versions that open them and display the first few
rows for free then charge you anything up to $40 per file to fully open
them. "excel key" for example will easily do the job but at a cost.

"advanced office password recovery" has a good trial version that gave me
"mag7" as the password for one of the two files so I'm half way there , but
it will only do a brute force attack of up to 4 characters without
registration and the other one seems to be longer than that.

 

As I said in the other reply , I've opened one now and it's random text so
the first couple of characters wouldn't really help us guess the whole thing
(the files were maliciously encrypted by an ex-employee).

I've got an older backup of the remaining file so there's only a couple of
weeks of potential additions that would need to be re-created so not a major
disaster (or expense if they want to pay to get them done)

 

I'd bill the cnut who encrypted them.

 

So would I , but for the usual office politics reasons they won't.

 

I'll give that a go , thanks.

The default encryption standard in 2003 is 40 bit RCA to be backwards
compatible with older versions.
It can do "uncrackable" encryption as well (for desktop values of
uncrackable) but that's not been used.

 

Online Excel Password Recovery Service at http://passwordnow.com - few
minutes and you have access to your document.