I believe Graham was referring to the first paragraph of his page which
reads:
"There are lots of people out there who purport to be able to crack
passwords, but Word's protection is pretty good and does not come with any
back doors, so while you can break the password eventually by trial and
error using software that will try all possible examples, a suitably strong
password will take a seriously long time to break. There is an example of
such software listed on the favourites (
http://www.gmayor.com/favorite.htm)
page of this site."
The rest applies to documents protected for collaboration with a password
and saving them with a new name doesn't strip the password. I wasn't
disagreeing, I think they're they're likely protected with a file access
password too and other than the first paragraph it's probably not relevant
to this specific situation.
~Beth Melton
Microsoft Office MVP
"Scott M." wrote in message
...
I was proceeding under the assumption that the docs have a password
required to open the file. Otherwise, the OP could open the file and
simply save it under a new name.
I found Graham's page not to be relevant because the OP is talking about
Word docs made in 1994, long before Word stored any meta information in
XML along with the document.
-Scott
"Beth Melton" wrote in message
...
I think there may be some confusion on the type of password that was set
on the documents. The information on Graham's page is for recovering a
passwords used to protect Word documents for forms/read only/tracked
changes which are all collaborative tools and aren't intended to be used
for security. When a document has been protected for collaboration then
it can be opened in Word and they can be easily bypassed. If a password is
required to open the document then Graham's page isn't applicable.
~Beth Melton
Microsoft Office MVP
"Scott M." wrote in message
...
I hardly think that Word documents saved in 1994 had XML metadata stored
along with them. And so, the information on your page would not be
useful.
Thirdly, there are MANY tools out there that use different techniques to
open a Word document that is password protected, here is just one
example of a very good tool:
http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/d...sword_14353_p/
I'm sorry Graham, but your information is just either wrong or not
applicable in this circumstance.