The staff member in our office who set up the FM databases has passed away. She set up these databases with some sort of password protection that does not allow us to have access to the Layout Mode. We are unaware of any kind of password that allows us to override this. Is there anything that we can do to access the Layout Mode so that we may make some changes to documents in our database??

This person set up a developer's password and then had the program default to either the user's password or no password when opening the program.

If you have a password, but you are never seeing a password dialogue box when opening the program, on Mac hold the Option key and on Windows hold the Shift key when opening up the program and the password dialogue box will appear.

You do not say which version of FMP but from your on screen info I am guessing that it is FMP 6. There are password crackers out there that will retrieve an FMP 6 password.

In FMP 7-8 you cannot retrieve the password, but you can replace it, again with a password retrieval utility.