We updated Advanced Office Password Recovery (AOPR) with guaranteed recovery of encrypted .doc and .xls files saved by legacy and modern Microsoft Office tools in Office 97/2000 compatibility mode. For these documents, we target the 40-bit encryption key instead of the password.

We updated Advanced Office Password Recovery (AOPR), our single-PC password recovery tool for documents created with Microsoft Office and third-party office tools. This update ends the long-lasted history of featuring two distinctly different products with confusingly similar names. The updated Advanced Office Password Recovery now integrates the features previously available in Advanced Office Password Breaker, which we have now discontinued.

Advanced Office Password Recovery provides instant access to many types of password-protected documents, including those created in Microsoft Word and Excel versions 97 and 2000. Some newer versions of Microsoft Word and Excel save documents and spreadsheets in compatibility mode by default, making them available for instant password recovery.

The tool can decrypt password-protected Word .doc documents and Excel .xls spreadsheets saved as "compatible" within a guaranteed, limited timeframe. No need to perform lengthy attacks while a 40-bit encryption key can be crunched quickly and efficiently, and more importantly, with a guaranteed positive result.

In addition to the brute-force attack on 40-bit encryption keys, Advanced Office Password Recovery brings the unique Thunder Tables® technology (available in the Forensic edition). This in-house development uses pre-computed tables to significantly speed up the recovery of 40-bit keys for Microsoft Word files. The technology will unlock a protected Word document in a matter of seconds instead of days. By pre-computing the hash tables and providing them on a USB thumb drive, Advanced Office Password Recovery can effectively unprotect Microsoft Word documents with 40-bit encryption.

In other words, the Home edition can break 40-bit encryption keys in a matter of hours, while the Forensic edition uses Thunder Tables to break the same encryption key in a matter of minutes.

For Microsoft Excel spreadsheets the pre-computed Rainbow Tables are provided, allowing to unlock about 97% of compatible Excel spreadsheets.

Advanced Office Password Recovery release notes:

• Guaranteed-timeframe recovery for legacy .doc/.xls documents by targeting 40-bit encryption keys instead of the password
• Forensic edition: unlocks 100% of Word documents in less than a minute with Thunder Tables®
• Forensic edition: unlocks 97% of Excel documents in several minutes with Rainbow Tables
• Added Thunder Tables downloading/unpacking progress bar
• Added progress bar for 40-bit attacks (brute force and Thunder Tables)
• Deprecated and removed Tips of the day
• Removed “run as administrator”
• Removed MS Passport and Microsoft Outlook features