Home › Unprotect an Excel sheet on a Mac
Search for how to unprotect a sheet without the password and you land on the same forum macro, copied across a thousand pages since about 2007. It opens the VBA editor, pastes fifty lines of nested For loops, and eventually announces a password like AAAABABAAB. On Windows, on an old file, it sometimes works.
On a Mac it usually does not, and the reasons are worth knowing before you spend twenty minutes on it.
It targets a hash that modern files no longer use. The macro never finds your real password — it brute‑forces a collision against the legacy 16‑bit protection hash used by .xls, a hash so short that thousands of different strings map to the same value. Excel 2007 onward replaced it: modern workbooks store a salted SHA‑512 hash with a spinCount of tens of thousands of iterations. There is no short collision to stumble on, so on an .xlsx or .xlsm the macro grinds through its loops and finds nothing.
It is 32‑bit code. Every version of Excel for Mac since 2016 is 64‑bit only. Any Declare statement in that copied macro needs the PtrSafe keyword and 64‑bit‑safe pointer types, and without them Excel stops at “compile error: the code in this project must be updated for use on 64‑bit systems”. Excel for Mac also runs VBA inside the macOS sandbox, so file access needs an explicit GrantAccessToMultipleFiles call that Windows macros never contain.
So the honest summary: the macro approach exists, it is not imaginary, and on a modern Mac with a modern file it is a dead end.
Then there is nothing Mac‑specific to worry about:
Sheet protection is an edit lock, not encryption — the workbook was never scrambled, only flagged. Removing the flag is a file edit, and a browser can do it:
This is genuinely the better Mac answer, and not because of the tool — it is that the alternatives on macOS are worse than on Windows. There is no equivalent of the Windows password‑removal utilities, VBA is the most restricted of any Excel version, and the file format is identical on both platforms, so a browser has exactly the same access to it that Excel does.
If you would rather see every step, an .xlsx is a ZIP archive and macOS ships with the tools to take it apart. The Finder route causes more problems than it solves here, so use Terminal:
mkdir unpacked && cd unpacked, then unzip ../Book.xlsx.xl/worksheets/sheet1.xml in a plain text editor and delete the whole <sheetProtection ... /> element. Repeat for each protected sheet.zip -r ../Book-unlocked.xlsx . -x '.DS_Store' -x '__MACOSX/*'.Two macOS‑specific traps to know about. Selecting the folder in Finder and choosing Compress wraps everything in an extra directory, and Excel then reports the workbook as corrupt — the XML parts must sit at the top level of the archive. And Finder scatters .DS_Store files through any folder you have viewed, which is what the exclusions above are for. Also turn on Finder → Settings → Advanced → Show all filename extensions before you start, or you will be renaming files blind.
The manual route works, but our free in‑browser tool does the same thing in one drop — nothing is uploaded, everything runs on your device.
Unlock your file now →Not for modern files. The widely copied macro attacks the legacy 16-bit hash that only older .xls files use, and it needs PtrSafe declarations to compile at all in 64-bit Excel for Mac. Editing the file directly is the reliable route.
No. The browser tool is a web page, and the manual route uses unzip and zip, which are already part of macOS. There is nothing to download and nothing for Gatekeeper to block.
Yes. Both routes operate on the file itself, so the processor makes no difference. The same is true of any Excel for Mac version from 2016 onward.
Numbers can import the data, but exporting back to .xlsx rewrites the entire workbook, which can alter formulas, pivot tables and conditional formatting. It is a conversion, not an unlock.
Excel password remover — free and online · How to remove a password from an Excel file · Unprotect an Excel sheet without the password