Password protected office 2010 file

[Melena]

Was notified about an excel file that was being worked on by a temp that was password locked. Staff has no way of reaching the temp since she's gone, and are needing it unlocked. It's an office 2010 Excel file. I found a tech net posting using office 2013 to unlock it but we don't have a private key server set up so that route won't work. Anyone know of a way to potentially crack it?

[Fiye]

Would it be possible to open it with Open Office, Office Libre, or Google Sheets? If there's some way to convert the file maybe the password won't remain?

[Melena]

Forgot to update, but they found a recent hard copy, scanned it to pdf, used adobe pro to convert it back and are now working on that. But yeah, tried that, it's encrypted so it came out as just gibberish.

[Dantrag]

Would it be possible to open it with Open Office, Office Libre, or Google Sheets? If there's some way to convert the file maybe the password won't remain?

That's not how encryption works. You can't just convert it to something else and it'll unlock itself.

I'm still looking around but can't really find anything concise.

[Fiye]

Oh I didn't realize that. I thought it was just a simple password protection.