Most of us these days are aware of the fact that our electronic data is not secure. Anyone on the web with a little know-how could access our computer over the Internet and get into our files. To keep our electronic data safe it is important to remember to password protect your MS Office documents. Password protecting documents takes very little effort and will prevent important or sensitive files from falling into the wrong hands.

Anyone who keeps financial information such as credit card or bank account numbers should ensure they password protect their documents. Additionally, if you work in an office and handle sensitive information about your company or any of your clients these documents should be protected as well. Doing so can save you a lot of trouble should the files fall into the wrong hands.

Now that we have covered how to keep your documents safe, what happens if you lose or forget the passwords? Obviously you dont want to use the same password on every document ” if someone ever guessed the password then all of your files would be at risk. At the same time using a different password every time will make it difficult to remember. Odds are at some point in time you are going to lose a password and need to access your files.

Luckily there are programs out there which are designed to help you retrieve your files should you forget the password. These programs, referred to as password recovery software, work in a few different ways to figure out what password you used.

Password recover software use several different methods in order to guess the right password for a file. One of these methods is to go through the dictionary and try every word in it. If you know that you always use a number or symbol in the password you can customize the search to include them.

To start the program will work through the dictionary, combining each word with numbers or symbols if you request. If your password is an actually word, then you should have some success here. Otherwise the software recovery tool will carry on to the next step, which is to try combinations of letters, numbers and symbols until it finds the right combination. The more complicated your password is, the longer the program will take to find the answer.

While there are many software programs offered for free, most people will have little success in getting these programs to access their files. Investing a few dollars will get you a much more streamlined program that will give you a much better chance of accessing your file, and in less time.

While this type of software is a great tool to use when you forget your password, it should not replace whatever method you use to keep track of your passwords. Create a bomb-proof file with a long and complicated password to store the keys to your other files, and commit the password to this file to memory ” do not write it down, or if you do keep it in a safe place where no one will find it. Then you can rest knowing that all your files are safe and sound.

The next time you are password protecting your documents, consider opening a secure document and saving your passwords in there, then make sure that the password you place on that document is 1) easy to remember and 2) complicated enough that a software recovery program couldn’t open it. Then you wont have to worry about lost passwords or unprotected files.