Easily unprotect multiple Excel workbooks at once

Author: Siluvia Last Modified: 2024-12-13

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Supposing there are workbooks in a folder protected with the same password, and you want to unprotect them all at once. How can you achieve it? Normally VBA code can help to solve the problem, but for Excel newbies, handling VBA is not an easy thing. Here recommend the Decrypt Workbooks feature of Kutools for Excel to help you easily solve the problem.

Easily unprotect multiple Excel workbooks at once

Please do as follows to unprotect multiple workbooks at once with the Decrypt Workbooks feature.

1. Click Kutools Plus > Encrypt Workbooks > Decrypt Workbooks. See screenshot:

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2. Then a Kutools for Excel dialog box pops up, click OK to continue.

Tips: Before unprotect workbooks, make sure these workbooks are closed in case error occurring.

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3. In the Decrypt Workbooks dialog box, you need to configure as follows.

3.1) Click the Add button

to add workbooks you want to unprotect.

There are 4 options you can use to add workbooks:

File(s): Select this option to open the Select File window, then choose the workbooks you need to decrypt;
Folder: Select this option to open the Select Folder window, then choose a folder which contains the workbooks you want to decrypt at once;
OneDrive File(s): Select this option, and then choose the workbooks you need to decrypt from a specific OneDrive account;
OneDrive Folder: Select this option, and then choose a folder which contains the workbooks you want to decrypt at once from a specific OneDrive account.

Note: The OneDrive File(s) and OneDrive Folder options only support Excel 2013 and the later versions.

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3.2) Then all selected workbooks are listed in the workbook window. You can uncheck the workbook if you don’t need to unprotect it, click the list column header to sort the workbooks, or click Clear all to remove all workbooks from the window.

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3.3) Specify a password to unprotect the workbooks:

Use passwords in Password Manager to decrypt them automatically: Select this option, it will try to use the passwords which saved in the Password Manager to unprotect the workbooks automatically. However, if no passwords matching, workbooks won’t be decrypted.
Use the following password: Select this option to manually enter a password in the textbox to unprotect the workbooks.

Tips:

Click to show password: Click this button to show the password in the textbox directly.

Passwords Manager

: Click this button to use the password you have saved in the Password Manage to unprotect the currently selected workbooks. After clicking the button, a list box containing all saved passwords pops up, click one of the passwords to fill in the textbox.

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3.4) Click OK to start unprotecting the selected workbooks.

4. Then a Kutools for Excel dialog box pops up to tell you how many workbooks are successfully decrypted, click OK to close it.

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5. Another Kutools for Excel dialog box pops up to ask for scenario saving. If you want to save current workbook configuration as a scenario, click Yes, otherwise, click No to finish the operation.

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6. If you click the Yes button, a Save Scenario dialog box will open. You need to type a name for the scenario and then click OK button.

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Now all selected workbooks are unprotected with the same password at once.

Tips:

1. Include subfolders when adding folders: after adding a folder, you can check this option to include all workbooks in the subfolders.

: Click this button will open the Password Manager dialog box. Click to know how to use the Password Manager feature.

: Click this button to open the Open scenario dialog box directly.

Or you can click the drop-down arrow to display the other options:

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Open: Click this open option can also open the Open scenario dialog box. All saved scenarios (including both encrypt and decrypt scenario) are saved in this dialog. Select one of the scenario and then click OK to open it.
Save: This option helps to save current workbook structure as a scenario. Click this option to open the Save Scenario dialog box, enter the scenario name and then click OK.
Save as: This option helps to save current scenario as a new one.
Manager: Click this option to open the Manager Scenario dialog box. In the dialog box, you can rename, delete and sort the saved scenarios as you need.

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