I have used the “Hex Editor to modify DPB to DPx” many times in the past to bypass VBA project security on my old Excel VBA projects (.xls), so I definitely know how to do it and know that I can do it.

However I have just tried to do it yesterday and found that it no longer seems to work. I tried using both Excel 2011 (Mac) and Excel 2003 (Windows) and in both cases, I got the same behaviour;

Opening the VBA editor gave a message saying that the project is corrupted and that the project will be removed. The VBA editor then opens and, sure enough, all VBA is stripped out from modules and worksheets.

I have tried this method:
Is there a way to crack the password on an Excel VBA Project? (ie. creating a spreadsheet with a known password and then copying across the relevant fields)

But find that the length of the “GC” key created on my ‘dummy’ spreadsheet is shorter than the “GC” key on the spreadsheet that I am wishing to access (the “target”). I had read elsewhere that in cases where the “target” keys were longer, you could pad the “dummy” keys to the same length but there is nothing i can find to say what to do in the reverse case.

So – my questions (s);

• Is anyone aware if a patch has been applied that makes the “hex editor” approach invalid?
• Can anyone help with what to do when the dummy keys are longer than the target keys?
• Can anyone else provide any updated onsite into this issue?

EDIT
Having now solved this (to some degree) i thought i’d add a summary here.

I HAVE NOT been able to get this to work on Mac Excel 2011. Something about changing the file from filname.xlsm to fielname.zip and back again results in a corrupted excel file which Excel 2011 refuses to recognise.

I DID manage to get this to work on an old windows machine (XP/Excel 2007) by modifying the .xlsm file name to .zip, editing the DPB= AND GC= values in the vbaproject.bin file with a hex editor then saving this in the .zip file before renaming the .zip back to xlsm. I used the “test” example given by Ricko at the bottom and it worked with ONE CAVEAT – i had to ‘pad’ out my GC value to make it that same length as the original one in my file.

ORIGINAL:       GC="0F0DA36FAF938494849484"
NEW:  (TEST)    GC="BAB816BBF4BCF4BCF4"  (from Ricko below)
NEW:  (TEST)    GC="BAB816BBF4BCF4BCF40000"  (what i used and what worked)