It's funny. This is not mentioned in any documentation as far as I know. Strange, becuase it seems kind of basic functionality/situation. All I found was a sentence in a Global Forum paper:
http://www2.sas.com/proceedings/forum2007/004-2007.pdf
under section 5. This is not a Institute contributed paper.
So, I think there is no way of reading this without having to disable your password. But if this data is sensitive, I suggest that you copy the Excel file to a safe location, and disable the password in that copy. Wouldn't that be sufficient?
Regards,
Linus
Data never sleeps