PDF files are a fantastic was to store computer documents. They can be opened on near enough any computer and the file will look the same as it was originally intended. Not just machines running Windows.

You can also make your PDFs more secure by putting a password on them. Before the PDF can be opened, the person who wants to read the file needs to enter a password.

Which is fine until the moment you need to open a PDF that’s password protected but you’ve put the password somewhere “safe”. Like in your home email and you’re trying to open the file at the office. It could be you’ve changed your email address or the email was on your old computer and never got swapped across. Or you thought “I’ll always remember that password” and never wrote it down. Maybe the PDF password was set by a colleague who doesn’t work for your company any more.

Ebooks you’ve just bought often have a password to “protect” them (I’ve no idea why they do this). For whatever reason, the product’s owner is paranoid and thinks that every customer has the ulterior motive of stealing their product. My personal view on this is that they should get real. After that, I re-name the PDF file so that it includes the password. That way it’s easy to find the password and I don’t have to hunt through all my emails to find it. I didn’t always do this and some early PDFs I’ve bought are still locked as not only have I lost the email but the firm I bought the ebook from no longer exists.

Whatever the reason for the lost PDF password, it means you can’t quickly get into the PDF to read it.

There are several ways to get around this problem.

You can give up and hope that there’s nothing of importance in the file.

If you’ve got time on your hands, you can start to enter all your “favorite” password combinations. Usually in the vain hope that you’ll quickly find the password you used to protect the file.

You can get hold of a cheap PDF password recovery program that will do all the hard work for you and will find the lost PDF password for you in a matter of minutes.

Discover one of the best PDF password recovery programs I’ve found.