In order to perform the crack / recovery, we are going to use a small utility called xlcrack, xlcrack recovers lost or forgotten passwords from XLS files such as those created by Microsoft Excel. Some newer XLS files are not suitable for password recovery using this software.
Install libgsf-1
[email protected]:~$sudo apt-get install libgsf-1-dev
Download and compile xlcrack
[email protected]:~$wget http://freshmeat.net/urls/1d5772c1c5bea2854e1d04b29f1f772a
[email protected]:~$tar zxvf xlcrack-1.2.tar.gz
[email protected]:~$cd xlcrack-1.2
[email protected]:~$make
How to Crack / Recover A Password From a XLS-file
[email protected]:~$./xlcrack password_protected_spreadsheet.xls
password_protected_spreadsheet.xls: 1234