VBA macro Developers always add passwords to protect their work. If a client has reached out to you to develop a solution for them, it is obvious that you would add a password to protect it. Why? Because it is your intellectual property! If the client needs to modify the macro, they should ideally reach out to you again to do the same. You can even ensure even user-level access to your VBA macros so that the client cannot distribute it to users beyond what was agreed upon.
But what if you have forgotten the password you have set for the VBA macro that you created for your client? Recreating the macro is unrealistic in terms of budget and timeline. So what then?
There are 2 ways in which you can remove the password you have set for your VBA macro. The first method, which we will discuss in this post, is the hard way or the manual way. And you guessed it right, the second way users another macro to break the password. So why do we need to learn the manual method then? Well although you need to do everything manually here, you would learn a lot about the workings of VBA macros in the process. By the way, both the methods work for Excel, Word, and PowerPoint (both 32- and 64-bit).
Let me give you some background first, every Excel, PowerPoint, and Word file is a ZIP file in disguise. Add a .zip to the end of the filename and you would be able to see the collections of files inside the ZIP file. That's what we need to do here:
1. Add a .zip to the end of the filename and hit enter
2. Once the file has been changed to a ZIP file, open it by double clicking on it
3. Inside you would see a folder called xl like below
4. Inside xl, you'll find a file called vbaProject.bin, copy/paste it on the desktop
5. Go to the online Hexadecimal Editor HexEd.it
6. Search for the following texts
CMG=....
DPB=...
GC=...
and change them to
CMGx=....
DPBx=...
GCx=...
7. Save the file and close HexEd.it
8. Copy/Paste the updated file from your desktop inside the ZIP file (you would need to overwrite it)
9. Remove the .zip extension from the end of the filename
10. Once you open the original file, it might show you the following errors
11. Click on Yes every time and now if you go over to the VBA code editor, you would be able to see the code without the password! Wasn't that easy?
