http://www.gmayor.com/remove_password.htm
Word documents protected for forms are not secure. You may not be able to readily discover the password, but you can easily remove it in Word 2003 using the script editor or by using the method shown later on this page.
Open the document in Word 2003 then press ALT+SHIFT + F11.
From the edit menu - select FIND and search for 'password'.
The search routine will take you to the area of the document where the password is stored
The bit we are interested is the unique sequence of digits in the middle of that line, highlighted below in red.
<w:UnprotectPassword>5F23E53C</w:UnprotectPassword>
Overwrite the red digits with zeros. <w:UnprotectPassword>00000000</w:UnprotectPassword>
Save the document from the script editor. Close the editor and you can unlock the fields without the original password from the forms toolbar
Here's the fastest way:
Open up .docx in 7-zip directly
Delete settings.xml
Close 7-zip
Here's a slower way:
http://newt3.typepad.com/newt3_weblog/2009/04/remove-document-protection-in-word-2007.html
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 .
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 didnt erase everything just put the enforce parameter to 0, then after i was done, back to 1.