A text editor like Notepad is expecting a textfile and therefore interprets
certain characters as control characters - such as vbLF, vbCR, EOF, new
page, tab and some of the other characters less than ASCII code 32.
Encountering the EOF indicator will cause the file to be terminated. This
usually happens well before the end of the file when reading in a binary
file. More than likely one reason why the OP could not find the target
strings and if he had found them and written them to another file, good
chance that file would be corrupted because the whole file wasn't read in
and subsequently saved. A hex editor doesn't try to interpret and act on
any characters. It give no meaning to the characters - just displays them
and allows you to change them and write the file back out.

Open an excel file in notepad. Change a recognizable character or even do
nothing. Save it over itself using saveas. See if you can open it in
Excel. In most cases, I would expect not - at least an not get the original
file. .

--
Regards,
Tom Ogilvy


"John Coleman" wrote in message
oups.com...
On Feb 4, 11:55 am, "Tom Ogilvy" wrote:
You have to do this in a HEX editor.

OK, but why? Naively I would think that a string of characters (copied
into the clipboard in Notepad) = stream of bytes = stream of hex
values. How does the clipboard succeed in mangling these values? The
only thing I can think of is that maybe it inserts some padding bytes
here and there in a way that you have no control over. That, or maybe
the entire block is somehow misaligned.

Just curious

-John Coleman


Hopefully you didn't need that file or made a copy of it (or it was just
a
play/test file). I think you can assume it is ruined.

--
Regards,
Tom Ogilvy

"Antonio" wrote in message

...



Hi Alen,

I have followed the steps.

I have used Notepad as the editor.

I copy the lines from the dummy file on top of the same lines of the
file
I
need the password for (target file).

Then I save this file with Notepad using Ctrl+S (not save as)

My problem is that when I try to open this file in Excel I get

"book2.xls" cannot be accessed. The file may be read only. Or you may
be
trying to access a read only location. Or the server the document is
stored
on may not be responding.

What am I doing wrong?

Thanks,

Antonio

" wrote:

Unbelivibale, but I found a very simple way that really works!

Do the follwoing:

1. Create a new simple excel file.
2. In the VBA part, set a simple password (say - 1234).
3. Save the file and exit.
4. Open the file you just created with a simple editor.
5. Copy the lines starting with the following keys:

CMG=....
DPB=...
GC=...

6. with a simple editor (again), open the excel file you don;t know
the VBA password for,
and paste the above copied lines from the dummy file.
7. save the excel file and exit.
8. Now, open the excel file you need to see the VBA code in. The
password for the VBA code
will simply be 1234 (as in the example I'm showing here).

Simply works...

Enjoy!

Alen- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -