Lalim Excel Password Recovery

Lalim Excel Password Recovery is a small-sized and portable application designed to crack passwords of your personal Microsoft Excel spreadsheets with the XLS format, in case you can't recall them.
It doesn't include complicated options or configuration settings, making it accessible to all types of users.

Portable tool with a simple GUI

The whole program's packed in just one .exe file that can be saved anywhere on the disk or moved to a USB flash drive to carry it with you whenever you're on the move, in order to run it on any computer without previous setup. It doesn't add new entries to the Windows registry.
As far as the interface is concerned, Lalim Excel Password Recovery sticks to a simple design and well-organized layout, where you can get started by opening a password-protected XLS spreadsheet using the file browser.

Configure brute force attack settings

The utility uses the brute force attack mode, which means that it tries all possible combinations to guess the password. If you remember details about the key, then you can narrow down the search time by indicating a range for the number of characters, along with the type of characters between uppercase and lowercase letters, and numbers. The entire task can take a very long time, depending on the complexity of the password.

Evaluation and observations

Unfortunately, the application hasn't received updates for a long time and doesn't seem to be in development anymore. It supports only spreadsheets created with Microsoft Excel 95-2007, so newer versions are not supported. The XLSX or XLSX filetypes are not supported either.
On top of that, the brute force attack mode doesn't give you the possibility to include symbols. There's also a dictionary attack mode available, which tries all words taken from an external file, but the option wasn't available in our tests (greyed out).

Conclusion

To sum it up, Lalim Excel Password Recovery is an outdated program that doesn't live up to modern standards for password recovery software. It's no longer in development and cannot be purchased.