How to unprotect all protected sheets in a workbook without a password?

When working with Excel, you may encounter situations where your sheets are password-protected, preventing you from making changes. While it's easy to remove protection if you know the password, it can be frustrating if you’ve forgotten it. Don’t worry - this guide will show you simple and effective methods to unprotect all sheets in your workbook without needing the password.

Unprotect all protected sheets without password by using Google Sheets

Unprotect all protected sheets without password by using Copy and paste command

 Unprotect all protected sheets without password by using Google Sheets

To unprotect all protected sheets, you can import the Excel file into Google Sheets, then save the Google Sheets file as an Excel file again. Please do with the following steps:

1. Open a new spreadsheet in Google Sheets, then, click "File" > "Import", see screenshot:

2. In the popped-out Import file dialog, under the "Upload" tab, drag the workbook contains protected sheets into the box, or click "Select a file from your device" button to upload the Excel file here, see screenshot:

3. After importing the Excel file, click the "Import data" button, see screenshot:

4. And now, you will see all sheets in the Excel file are displayed in the Google Sheets.

5. And then, go to the" File" tab, and click "Download" > "Microsoft Excel (.xlsx)", see screenshot:

6. After downloading the file, open the workbook, and all the protected sheets are unprotected. Now, you can edit the data as you need.

 Unprotect all protected sheets without password by using Copy and paste command

If you are not familiar with the Google Sheets, here, you can use the copy and paste command to copy and paste the data from the protected sheet to another new workbook.

1. Go to the protected sheet, and then input the cell range (A1:Z1000) of the sheet into the "Name Box" directly, and press "Enter" key, see screenshot:

2. After pressing "Enter" key, nothing happens apparently. Please don’t do anything, just press "Ctrl" + "C" to copy the specified range, then you can see the data in the range A1:Z1000 has been surrounded by the dotted line, see screenshot:

3. Then, just press "Ctrl" + "V" to paste it to another worksheet or workbook where you want to put the data of the protected sheet.