How to remove password protection from Excel xlsx worksheets without knowing the password?

Question

excel

According to this article, vellisa.ru/snyat-parol-zashhityi-lista-excel renamed the .xlsx extension to .zip, found all sheet.xml and removed all sheetProtection tags from the opening quote to the closing quote <>, saved the files and transferred them with a replacement to the archive, renamed the .zip back to .xlsx and ... the password protection from the sheets was not removed. Excel 2013 version 15.0.5137.1000

One of the Sheet after unpacking takes 150 megabytes and does not open Notepad ++ and in a regular notepad it opens in less than a second and looks suspiciously short for its size. In EditPad Lite I opened a huge sheet.xml file and there was no sheetProtection there.

Maybe I'm doing something wrong? How to remove password protection from sheets?

Addendum: The file cannot be opened without attempting to restore (Error in some of the content in the book ... Do you want to try to restore? If you trust the source from which the book was obtained, click the "Yes" button).
After recovery:

Removed property: Data validation from the /xl/worksheets/sheet3.xml part Removed property:
Data validation from the /xl/worksheets/sheet6.xml part Removed
property: Data validation from the /xl/worksheets/sheet8.xml part Removed
property: Data validation from the /xl/worksheets/sheet9.xml part
Removed entries: Formula from the /xl/worksheets/sheet4.xml part
Removed entries: Formula from the /xl/calcChain.xml part (Calculation Properties)

Those. what I delete in the sheet is restored and the password protection is also restored ... Seconds 20 percent recovery bar goes. And WHERE is restored at the same time - can it be downloaded from the Internet? Could they have done this on purpose so that the protection could not be removed? And how to block the recovery and so that xlsx opens without recovery?

Answer 1

Resave to xls, then open in OpenOffice Calc 2.3 (or lower). Voila.

Answer 2

Apparently your whole problem is that the main info is stored in this 150 MB sheet.xml
Find an editor that will open such a file. I'm sure FAR would have opened. But notepad++ is also supposed to.