Chris: Geek Guy

At work, I recently needed to edit a database connection string in an Excel spreadsheet. Unfortunately the macros were password protected, the person who wrote the spreadsheet left the company some years ago, and we had no record of the password.

Luckily, thanks to a post on David Bugden’s blog, I discovered that it’s simple to circumvent VBA macro password protection without having to purchase a commercial utility such as Passware’s VBA Key.

The hex editor method worked for me in Excel 2003, although I’m not sure whether Microsoft have beefed up the security in 2007 and later versions.

If you want to remove the password used to protect/unprotect worksheets and workbooks, there is some information available here.

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Today I needed to recover one of my FTP account passwords from FileZilla. If you find yourself in the same situation, there is a free tool available here which does the trick nicely, along with password removal/recovery tools for a whole host of other programs.

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Nvu is a great alternative to commercial web editors: not as full featured as Dreamweaver or FrontPage, but you can’t beat the price – free.

However, there is a bug in the Site Manager, which means that if you elect not to save the password for a site, you will receive a “Login incorrect” error message when you attempt to connect to the site, instead of a password prompt as expected.

Fortunately, the fix is simple – in the Site Manager, tick the “Save Password” box. Of course, this means that anyone with physical access to your machine (and user account) can edit the site, but it’s good general security practice to lock or log off your workstation when you’re away from it anyway.

(via forum.nvudev.org)

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