I received a word document I needed for a project I was doing, but it was protected. I was connecting it to a spreadsheet to merge in some data so I would not have to time it in twice. The protection had to go, but the sender either did not have the password, or did not want to give it out. I did a quick search and found this nice instructable:
I went through the steps an with the hour, I had the sheet all unsecured and fixed for my use. However today, or more precisely on my drive in, I started thinking there was probably an easier way using OpenOffice. Sure enough. I opened the doc with OpenOffice, save back as MSWord format and it gives you a nice little check box.
This was much easier, though it did not make me feel like quite the hacker the other method did.