What a pain... need to edit a Microsoft Word 2007 form that was originally created by an individual who is no longer employed at my company. I can use Word but am a long way from being any kind of expert. So googled by questions and found I should save the dot document as a docx. Did that but could not edit because it was protected. Googled how to remove protection and came accross http://community.sgdotnet.org/blogs/kitkai/archive/2007/08/20/Remove-Document-Protection-against-Edit-in-Word-2007.aspx with the following that worked great:
- Rename the document to zip format
- Open it up in my favorite zip program
- Edit settings.xml in Notepad
- Look for "protection" in the xml file, and you will locate <w:documentProtection> element.
- Remove all the attributes in it.
- Update the zip file
- Rename the document back to docx
- Open it up in Word 2007, and you are able to edit the document...
Now I can edit .
Thank you for posting this. This is exactly what I needed to know. I have a form that I needed to crack for my job and the employee who created the form has long since left.
Posted by: Nina | June 18, 2009 at 12:00 PM
I tried this, whenever I open the document in 7zip there is no settings.xml file.
Instead there is 6 files that are encrypted and scrabled.
Posted by: Notsure | July 12, 2010 at 10:16 PM
Thanks Permalink. For Notsure-: settings.xml file in ./word folder.
Posted by: Paradox | May 07, 2011 at 11:33 PM
Thanks, Worked perfectly for me
Posted by: Pete | June 07, 2011 at 06:52 AM
That worked wonders. Thank you so much!
Posted by: Rob | July 28, 2011 at 11:00 AM
That worked on Word 2011. After removing the attributes there was an error when opening the file. But Word was able to repair and open it.
Posted by: Niro | February 25, 2012 at 03:22 AM
cool worked for me!
Posted by: ssk | March 20, 2012 at 01:12 PM
Hi, thanks for a good job! It helped me a lot!
In my case i need it to chnage some formating and then reprotect the file, so all I did different was in step 5. I didn't erase everything just put the enforce parameter to 0, then after i was done, back to 1.
Posted by: Radu | March 29, 2012 at 05:53 AM
Worked great. I had to save the .xml file to the desktop to save the changes and then drag it into winzip to replace the existing file.
Posted by: Jay | April 24, 2012 at 09:33 AM