There is an even-easier way to bypass “Password for Forms” passwords in Word.
Last week I told you about the bogus “Word security exposure” that made it into the computer press, when writers should’ve known better. In a nutshell, a very bright guy discovered that he could zap out a Word “Password for Forms” password with a simple text editor. Why the press picked that up as a security exposure boggles my mind. Form Passwords aren’t designed to protect a document: they only exist to make it slightly more difficult to clobber a form.
There’s an even-easier way to bypass “Password for Forms” passwords. Office Watch reader CC wrote: “My IT dept at the law firm didn’t have a solution for me when our bank provided documents for electronic signatures and we wanted to modify them. They were password protected and our officer was away and couldn’t provide the password. I reached into the depths of my mind and tried using Insert | File to insert the form-password-protected file into a document that wasn’t protected. Viola! Low tek solutions are sometimes the most amazing to tekies!”
