Microsoft Office 2000 WORD password not working. PW length limit might be your problem

[ukgp03]

Just wanted to share the following experience with the universe, maybe
it would help somebody someday.

I protected a WORD document with a 16 characters long password which
was a phrase easy for me to remember, reentered the PW as requested
and MS WORD accepted it with no warning regarding any length limit.

Immediately after then I tried to open the document, WORD responded
that the PW was incorrect and did not give me access to the document.
For hours I have tried typo variations of the password as that was my
best assumption of what happened though it looked to me unlikely that
I repeated the same typo when initially reentering the PW.

after a long annoying while I decided to do an experiment and protect
a different dummy document with exactly the same password, guess what,
I faced the same behavior it did not open.

I then desperately made a wild guess that there is a length limit to
the PW, though I would have expected that if there is one it should
not have accepted when first entered and a warning should have been
issued. Anyway I chopped the last character and unbelievably the word
document opened.

I don't know if a length limit on the PW is documented any where, but
if there is such limit it should not accept the over-length PW when
entered at the first place or ignore the extra character when
accessed.

 

[Bob Buckland ?:-\)]

The password length limit is basically 15 characters.
It's listed in the Word 2000 help file if I recall
and mentioned here:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;224036&FR=1

It's not uncommon for software to allow more characters
to be typed to help make it more difficult to 'guess'
the combination.

=======
Just wanted to share the following experience with the universe, maybe
it would help somebody someday.

I protected a WORD document with a 16 characters long password which
was a phrase easy for me to remember, reentered the PW as requested
and MS WORD accepted it with no warning regarding any length limit.

Immediately after then I tried to open the document, WORD responded
that the PW was incorrect and did not give me access to the document.
For hours I have tried typo variations of the password as that was my
best assumption of what happened though it looked to me unlikely that
I repeated the same typo when initially reentering the PW.

after a long annoying while I decided to do an experiment and protect
a different dummy document with exactly the same password, guess what,
I faced the same behavior it did not open.

I then desperately made a wild guess that there is a length limit to
the PW, though I would have expected that if there is one it should
not have accepted when first entered and a warning should have been
issued. Anyway I chopped the last character and unbelievably the word
document opened.

I don't know if a length limit on the PW is documented any where, but
if there is such limit it should not accept the over-length PW when
entered at the first place or ignore the extra character when
accessed. >>
--
I hope this helps you,

Bob Buckland ?
MS Office System Products MVP

*Courtesy is not expensive and can pay big dividends*

The Office 2003 System parts explained
http://microsoft.com/uk/office/preview/system.asp

MS on 'Why Office System 2003'
http://microsoft.com/mscorp/execmail/2003/10-13productivity.asp

 

[Invisible]

The password length limit is basically 15 characters.

It's listed in the Word 2000 help file if I recall
and mentioned here:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;224036&FR=1

It's not uncommon for software to allow more characters
to be typed to help make it more difficult to 'guess'
the combination.

But even so, if it ignores the extra characters when setting the password,
it should also ignore then when trying to use that password later... *sigh*
But clearly it doesn't. ;-)

 

[ukgp03]

At least one should add to that support note:

WD2000: ErrMsg: "The password is incorrect. Word cannot open the
document."
....
THINGS TO TRY

Check if your password was longer then 15 characters, if so enter only
the first 15 characters.

- As suggested it would also be nice to see it fixed by MS such that a
meaningful warning is issued or the extra characters are automatically
ignored when trying to use the password.