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I have some old MS Word documents on an external hard drive dating as far back as 2003/2004. Only trouble is that they're password protected and I can't remember any of the passwords I really want to read them. Is there a program or something I can use to unlock them? I'm using a Mac.

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• Word Document
• What Is Word Document For Mac Free

Pages is a powerful word processor that lets you create stunning documents, and comes included with most Apple devices. And with real-time collaboration, your team can work together from anywhere, whether they’re on Mac, iPad, iPhone, or using a PC. AutoSave is a different feature which automatically saves your file as you work - just like if you save the file manually - so that you don't have to worry about saving on the go. On the Mac, AutoSave is available in Excel, Word, and PowerPoint for Microsoft 365 for Mac subscribers. When AutoSave is turned on AutoRecover files are rarely needed. Convert rich text documents to other formats. With TextEdit, you can open and edit rich text documents created in other word processing apps, including Microsoft Word and OpenOffice. You can also save your documents in a different format, so they’re compatible with other apps. How to open, edit, and convert documents.

Are you in a similar situation? Don't have a clue about how to unlock a word document on Mac? Well, you have come to the right place. We are here to share a few workarounds you need to follow to open a password protected word document on Mac. Scroll through and learn all the required steps.

Part 1: How to Unlock A Word Document on Mac without Password

If you don't have the password for the file, we have two methods following which you can easily unlock the file.

Method 1. Find Back Your Password through Keychain Access

You can recover your MS Word document password on Mac through the Keychain access utility. The Keychain Access is nothing but an application on your Macintosh to save the data related to your account; it also manages all the passwords you need to remember to access, for example, your email account, network server, or a website.

Here are the steps you need to follow to find your password in Keychain:

Step 1: Double-click the 'Applications' folder on your main hard drive. Find 'Utilities' in the list displayed. Click on it.

Step 2: Then, from there, double click on 'Keychain Access'. Now, Select the Password tab and click on Name.

Step 3: Then, double-click on 'Microsoft Office'.

Step 4: After that click on the 'Attributes' and you need to check the box beside 'Show Password' tab as well.

Step 5: Finally, type your system administrator password and click 'Allow' to finish.

Hence, you have successfully recovered your MS Word password on Mac.

Method 2. Make Use of Windows Operating System

If the Keychain access cannot recover the password for you, you can make use of a third-party password recovery software to recover Word document password. But here is an issue that probably comes in your mind. You must not have heard about any third-party password recovery programs that allow you to unlock a word document on Mac. Actually, what you have heard is true. So, what's the solution for Mac users?

In this case, what you need to do is transfer the password-protected MS Word document file to your Windows computer from Mac. Once you complete that, you can use Passper for Word tool to recover your MS Word file password. This is a great utility tool that can definitely help you. Have a look at the key features of Passper for Word password recovery tool.

Key features of Passper for Word:

• Created with the advanced algorithm, Passper for Word has the highest recovery rate.

• Having CPU and GPU acceleration, Passper offers you the fastest recovery speed.

• It offers 4 attack types to recover the password. You can choose according to how much information you know about the password.

• Easy to use features; you do not have to be a computer expert by using it.

• What's more, all restrictions on your word document can be remove with one click within seconds.

Now you know the key features of the tool, you must be thinking about the steps required to unlock the password-protected MS Word document. Follow the steps below to understand the whole process:

Word Apple Mac

Firstly, download and install the Passper for Word password recovery tool on your system. Once done, run the software.

How to Recover Word Document Password

Step 1 Choose Recover Passwords option on the main interface of the tool.

Step 2 Click on the '+' button to import your locked word document. Then, you need to choose one recovery method according to the information you remember about your password.

Step 3 Once you choose the suitable attack mode and done with the configuration settings, simply click on the Recover button and the process will begin. After a while, the correct password will be displayed on the screen.

How to Remove Restrictions from Word Document

Step 1 To remove the restrictions, you need to choose Remove restrictions on the home page.

Step 2 Click 'Select a File' to import your protected word document. Once the file is successfully uploaded, click on the Remove button.

Step 3 Seconds later, all restrictions on your word document will be successfully removed and you will receive the restriction-free word file.

Part 2: How to Unlock A Word Document on Mac with Password

If you already have the password, you don’t require to go through all those complex methods. All you need is to follow these simple steps to unlock a Word file and remove the protection on your Mac computer.

Step 1: Firstly, open the protected document. Enter the correct password in the pop-up screen.

Step 2: Click on the File menu and choose Preference from the list.

Step 3: The Word Preference window will pop up. Choose Security and click OK button to continue.

Step 4: In the Security screen, you can remove both Password to Open and Password to Modify. Click OK to finish the operation. Please remember to save the word document.

Word Document

As you already got all the steps to unlock your Word document on Mac, it's time for us to drop the mic. As we mentioned before, there is not any program can be used to recover password for word document on Mac. Good news is that Passper for Word is considering developing Mac version. It is worth waiting!

If you receive a Microsoft Word document from someone who seems to think that everyone has Word, it can be frustrating. But you have several options to view and even edit the Word document on your Mac without buying anything. You can use Quick Look or Preview to view the file. TextEdit can be used to get access to simple text documents. Pages can open Word documents and most formatting is retained. You can also edit and export back out in Word format. The ultimate solution is to spend the money to get Word from the App Store, though it requires a paid subscription.

Check out Opening Microsoft Word Documents On a Mac at YouTube for closed captioning and more options.

Video Transcript: So from time to time you may get a document in Microsoft Word format. Sometimes people just don't get that this is not a universal format. You get docs from teachers and parents at schools. You get them from organizations. You get them from all over the place. People assume because their computer came with Microsoft Word or they got it a long time ago that everybody has Microsoft Word. Even some people on Windows don't have Microsoft Word. But you can still view word documents and even edit them on your Mac with some software that comes installed on your Mac already or is just free. So let's take a look.Here I have some sample Word documents. The first one is a pretty simple text document. I'm going to open it up. I do have Microsoft Word so this is what it looks like in Microsoft Word. Now let's say I don't have Word. Well, the first way I could view this is just by simply using Quick Look. That's just selecting the file and hitting the spacebar. This is what I get here in Quick Look. It's not exactly the same at all. It changes the formatting a lot. But if there's just basic information, and there are plenty of times when we get like three paragraphs of plain text in a Microsoft Word document, why they didn't just include this in the email as text I don't know, but it comes in Microsoft Word format and you can read it here using just Quick Look.Now at the same time you could also go in the Finder, I'm going to create a new Finder window here, and go to Desktop and there's the word doc. If I'm viewing say in Column View I'll see the Preview here on the right side. So you do see it there as well. Quick Look gives you a nice window version of that. You can scroll through it and see what's there.Another way you can view is Open With Preview. So you can drag and drop it onto Preview. You can use File Open in Preview. I'm going to Control click on it and choose Open With Preview. Then Preview allows me to view the document. I can't do much more with it but it's nice to have it open in an actual application here. I can actually Export it as PDF. So if I want to pass it along, perhaps, I could pass it along in a good format rather than one people may not be able to access.Another way to do it is to open with TextEdit. Now TextEdit doesn't have the ability to display graphics and layout and stuff like Preview does. So it's a lot more basic. Images aren't even included that's in this document. But it is editable text. So now maybe I can clean this up and pass it along in a standard format. TextEdit uses either Plain Text or Rich Text format which can be used on any machine. So if you get a few paragraphs of text without any layout or anything then TextEdit is a good option.Now, of course, the heavy hitter is to open it up in Pages. If you open it up in Pages it's going to be able to do a lot of what Word can do. So you can end up with a document that looks very similar. You get a little warning there that things may look different but in the case of this document it actually looks very much like the Word document. There's not that much that changes in here. So if you need to actually edit the document and you don't have Word at all this is probably your best bet. It may make some changes but at least now you have a real document. You can make changes to it. You can insert images. You can move layout around and when you're done you can actually export it back to Word format. So that's a huge advantage for Pages.Now let's take a look at how these other documents fare. With this document here I'm going to open it up in Word. You can see here it's got lots of images and layout and things like that. So let's compare that to Quick Look. Press the Spacebar. You can see it really messes up a lot of it. But some of it's okay. So at least you can see the images and you can see some text. Opening it up in TextEdit, of course, is going to just give me some plain text. It's actually going to kind of break things up trying to do a little bit with the table layout that's inside there. But you can get to the text. So if that's what you wanted then TextEdit will accomplish that. If you open it up in Pages it's going to come pretty close. You can see how it even gets the top right. It really looks pretty good. You can kind of continue working on the document here in Pages.Now let's take a look at this resume here. So this looks great in Word. If I were to use the Spacebar to bring it up in Quick Look you can see it breaks it a lot. TextEdit is going to look pretty bad but I can still get to some of the text. Pages will actually make it look pretty nice. Notice this warning box here that we've been getting. This will give you some idea of what might have changed. So you can see that some objects in tables cells were removed. There's a font that's missing. There's some headers and footers, and shapes and things that aren't there. Form components. There's a bunch of stuff but despite all that this doesn't look too much different from this. You can get the general idea.Now, of course, the ultimate way to view a Word document is to actually use Microsoft Word. You can get, of course, Word for Mac. There's still some people that don't realize this but it's always been true. At least true for decades. You can actually find it in the App Store. You go to the App Store now and you can actually find Microsoft Word there. Now it looks like it's free. It's NOT free. Now Microsoft Word uses a subscription model. So you need to actually buy a subscription. It's an annual subscription. That's how Microsoft and Adobe and a lot of other companies sell software based on an annual subscription and you get all the updates, automatically, for free. So you do have the ability, especially if you're using this professionally, then you should probably spend the money to get Microsoft Office and you get Word and Excel and everything as the real apps on your Mac. Then you can open them up as you need.There are other ways to do this as well. There are other office apps like Open Office, for instance. There's also Goggle Docs. You can upload a Word document to Goggle Docs and view it in Goggle Docs. You have the same kind of issues there. It's not perfect. It's not recreating layouts and things like that perfectly. But if you use Goggle Docs a lot that may be an option to simply bring those in to Goggle Docs and open them up on the web app, for the word processor in Goggle Docs.

What Is Word Document For Mac Free