Originally Posted by
corporate-wage-slave
The encryption levels on recent versions of Excel and Word - widely available - are surprisingly powerful, so long as you use a good password of say 16 alphanumerics, lower and uppercase and a few non literal characters such as ! and $. You may think that remembering a password that long is tricky but 3 or 4 short words, ideally not in English plus a few joining characters isn't so tricky.
E.g. meRci£poUr99luft (thanks for 99 Luftballons)
has 534 x 10³³ combinations!
My strategy is slightly different. I read the recent report suggesting the combination of several easy-to-remember words was probably better than a random password but this ignores the fact that it's best practice to use unique passwords for each login because people will find it easier to remember and use one complex multi-word password than several. The temptation for many therefore will be to use one multi-word password for several accounts.
Of course, if one account is then hacked and the same password has been used for multiple logins across the internet there's far more risk of real damage.
Instead, I use a very long unique and randomly generated password (with special characters where possible if the account permits it) for each account and store them in 1password5. As with others above using other software I have this database of passwords synced with Dropbox and other devices automatically so that they are all available to me wherever I go.
Of course the software requires a master password so that would be a good use for a single easy to remember multi-word password.