You have not yet voted on this site! If you have already visited the site, please help us classify the good from the bad by voting on this site. A common error message that an Excel user generally encounters when he tries to open a spreadsheet received in an email is: 'Excel cannot open the file 'filename.xlsx' because the file format for the file extension is not valid. Verify that the file has not been corrupted and that the file extension matches the format of the file.'

Applies to: Office 2013, Office 365 ProPlus Topic Last Modified: 2016-12-16 Summary: Explains how to use the Office 2013 DocRecrypt tool to unlock password protected OOXML formatted Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. Audience: IT Professionals Use Group Policy to push registry changes that associate a certificate with password-protected documents. This certificate information is embedded in the file header. Later, if the password is forgotten or lost, use the DocRecrypt command line tool and the private key to unlock the file and, optionally, assign a new password. If you want information about passwords in a personal copy of Office 2013, see instead. See for an additional example. If you are an IT Professional looking to remove or reset passwords in Office 2013 files within your organization, for example if an employee has left the organization and you do not know the password, you’re at the right place, keep reading.

There are many reasons why users may want or have to password protect a Word, Excel, or PowerPoint document. Vcm Editor Keygen. For example: • Multiple people in an immediate organization want to work on a group budget, but don’t want those numbers to be visible to the greater organization until they are finished.

• Consultants work with clients who require, through a service level agreement, that their sensitive data remain protected when it leaves client control. • Teachers want to make sure tests that are created in Word cannot be compromised. • Media professionals, and scientists who work on presentations to key researchers in their fields, want to make sure their breakthroughs do not leak to the public before their major announcements. Previously, if the original creator of a file password either forgot the password or left the organization, the file was rendered unrecoverable. By using Office 2013 and an escrow key, which is generated from your company or organization’s private key certificate store, an IT admin can “unlock” the file for a user and then either leave the file without password protection, or assign a new password to the file. You, the IT admin, are the keeper of the escrow key which is generated from your company or organization’s private key certificate store.

You can silently push the public key information to client computers one time through a registry key setting that you can manually create or you can create it through a Group Policy script. When a user later creates a password-protected Office 2013 Word, Excel, or PowerPoint file, this public key is included in the file header. Later, an IT pro can use the Office DocRecrypt tool to remove the password that is attached to the file, and then, optionally, protect the file by using a new password. To do this, the IT pro must have all the following: • The new Office DocRecrypt tool • The Word, Excel, or PowerPoint file that has an embedded public key • Permission and access to public and private keys that are associated with the certificate. This feature does not prescribe a corporate process for managing and distributing a private key, where that key is stored, any permissions and authorization that are required to request that a password be cracked or reset, or where the file should be located after it is restored. These decisions should be guided by your organization's standards and processes.

That said, to maintain a high level of security on password-protected files, we recommend that your organization adopt these policies: • Never push the private key to a client computer! This is our most important recommendation. • Lock the certificate store that has the private key and the certificate that was used to generate the escrow key and public keys. • Make sure that no single individual can compromise public key infrastructure (PKI) services. Also, we recommend that you distribute certificate management roles across different people in your organization. If you do not follow these recommendations consistently, the security of all new password-protected files can be compromised. Your company or organization should already have a well-defined Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS) administration model and certification authority (CA) infrastructure strategy that includes, for example, off-site storage of the private key and certificates.