Can I recover a forgotten password?

The short answer is no, unless you saved the password somewhere you can find it again. Word keeps no record of your passwords.

The best passwords are hard to crack—that's how they make your document more secure. To help protect your document, Word doesn't keep a password anywhere you can get it—or anywhere we can get it.

Note:  Third parties offer software online that they claim can retrieve a password in Word. We can't recommend them, and we don't guarantee their results.

Learn more about how to create a password, change a password, and remove a password.