Unlock Documents that have a Password: A Free, Open-Source Tool to Decrypt Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF Documents Locally

Doc Unlocker is a free, portable (no need to install), open-source desktop app that helps you recover the password of a Microsoft Office or PDF document you own — with a friendly GUI, smart guessing, and optional GPU acceleration.

Use it responsibly. Doc Unlocker is a password-recovery tool for documents you own or are explicitly authorised to access — for example, a file whose password you forgot. Do not use it on documents you have no right to open.

What it does

You point it at a password-protected document and it works to produce an unlocked copy (Unlocked_<yourfile>).

Supported files: Microsoft Word (.docx, .docm, .doc), Excel (.xlsx, .xlsm, .xls), PowerPoint (.pptx, .pptm, .ppt) and PDF (.pdf).

A. Smart CPU guessing

B. GPU acceleration (via Hashcat)

For modern Office encryption (AES-256 / SHA-512 / 100,000 iterations, Hashcat mode -m 9600), the CPU is slow by design. Doc Unlocker can hand the work to your GPU:

GPU acceleration currently targets Office files only. PDFs use the CPU path; PDF GPU modes are planned.

C. Quality-of-life

Installation

Option A — Download the ready-made build (easiest)

Option B — Run from source (Windows)

git clone https://github.com/Fallax-Vision/doc_unlocker.git
cd doc_unlocker
py -m pip install -r requirements.txt
py doc_unlocker.py

On first launch the app offers to install its small dependencies (msoffcrypto-tool, olefile, pypdf, customtkinter) automatically.

How it works (under the hood)

Contributing — help wanted

This is a community project and contributions are very welcome. We especially need help building macOS and Linux versions. Good first issues: app screenshots, more wordlists, translations and CI improvements.

License

Released under the MIT License — free to use, modify, redistribute and even commercialise. Made by Fallax Vision and contributors.