I think we have a very different view on what the problem is.
I am by no means expert on text encoding, or brute forcing or Hashcat for that matter. But I do understand well enough to tell you that text encoding is not encryption, so there is nothing to brute force. Text encoding is just a matter of turning numbers into letters in computer systems, and there have been many different encodings like ASCII and later Extended ASCII, and now most commonly UTF-8 as part of Unicode. I have a lot to read up on this myself, but I can confidently say that there is nothing to brute force when it comes to dealing with text encodings.
If the problem is mainly that you are missing the "ê" letter on your keyboard and you simply need to enter it in the password field of Excel, then you can use the Alt code that Nick provided (Alt+0234). But I fear that the problem is not that simple. If it were, you could simply select the text inside "[hex encoded password here]", copy it and then paste that in the password field of Excel. I suspect that this is what the real problem is, because it's not accepting it as the correct password.
I'm sorry, I still don't fully understand the problem. I think I will have to test this on my end to understand the process.
If you already know the password, can you open the Excel file with it the normal way? Also, is it the same as what you see inside brackets in "[hex encoded password here]"?
I am by no means expert on text encoding, or brute forcing or Hashcat for that matter. But I do understand well enough to tell you that text encoding is not encryption, so there is nothing to brute force. Text encoding is just a matter of turning numbers into letters in computer systems, and there have been many different encodings like ASCII and later Extended ASCII, and now most commonly UTF-8 as part of Unicode. I have a lot to read up on this myself, but I can confidently say that there is nothing to brute force when it comes to dealing with text encodings.
If the problem is mainly that you are missing the "ê" letter on your keyboard and you simply need to enter it in the password field of Excel, then you can use the Alt code that Nick provided (Alt+0234). But I fear that the problem is not that simple. If it were, you could simply select the text inside "[hex encoded password here]", copy it and then paste that in the password field of Excel. I suspect that this is what the real problem is, because it's not accepting it as the correct password.
I'm sorry, I still don't fully understand the problem. I think I will have to test this on my end to understand the process.
If you already know the password, can you open the Excel file with it the normal way? Also, is it the same as what you see inside brackets in "[hex encoded password here]"?