Unprotect an Excel file programmatically

Question

We\'re getting an Excel file from a client that has open protection and Write Reserve protection turned on. I want to remove the protection so I can open the Excel file wit

Answer 1

The suggestion from @Tim Williams worked. (Use SaveAs and pass empty strings for the Password and WriteResPassword parameters.) I used 'None' for the 'format' parameter after filename, and I used a new filename to keep Excel from prompting me asking if OK to overwrite the existing file. I also found that I did not need the wb.Unprotect and wb.UnprotectSharing calls using this approach.

Answer 2

This function works for me

def Remove_password_xlsx(filename, pw_str):
    xcl = win32com.client.Dispatch("Excel.Application")
    wb = xcl.Workbooks.Open(filename, False, False, None, pw_str)
    xcl.DisplayAlerts = False
    wb.SaveAs(filename, None, '', '')
    xcl.Quit()

Answer 3

This post helped me a lot. I thought I would post what I used for my solution in case it may help someone else. Just Unprotect, DisaplyAlerts=False, and Save. Made it easy for me and the file is overwritten with a usable unprotected file.

import os, sys
import win32com.client

def unprotect_xlsx(filename):
    xcl = win32com.client.Dispatch('Excel.Application')
    pw_str = '12345'
    wb = xcl.workbooks.open(filename)
    wb.Unprotect(pw_str)
    wb.UnprotectSharing(pw_str)
    xcl.DisplayAlerts = False
    wb.Save()
    xcl.Quit()

if __name__ == '__main__':
    filename = 'test.xlsx'
    unprotect_xlsx(filename)

Answer 4

if you are on MacOS (or maybe Linux? not tested)

You have to install Microsoft Excel and xlwings

pip install xlwings

Then run this:

import pandas as pd
import xlwings as xw

def _process(filename):
  wb = xw.Book(filename)
  sheet = wb.sheets[0]
  df = sheet.used_range.options(pd.DataFrame, index=False, header=True).value
  wb.close()
  return df

Resources:

• Adapted from this script: https://davidhamann.de/2018/02/21/read-password-protected-excel-files-into-pandas-dataframe/

• xlwings documentation: https://docs.xlwings.org/en/stable/api.html