Copying a table out of a PDF by hand is the kind of job that eats an afternoon and still ends up with a typo in it. This finds the tables in your document and hands them back as a spreadsheet — one sheet per table, headers in place, and the figures written as real numbers, so a total works the moment you type it. Before you download anything, you see exactly which tables were found and can drop the ones you don't want.
How to convert PDF to Excel
Upload your PDFChoose the document with the tables in it. We'll say straight away if it's a scan, which needs OCR first.
See what we foundEvery table is listed with its page and size, and you can preview each one before committing to it.
Pick the tables you wantUntick anything you don't need — a page header that came through as a row, or a table from a section you don't care about.
DownloadTake it as .xlsx with one sheet per table, or a single .csv. Your file is gone the instant your download is ready.
What you can do
- Turn a bank or credit-card statement into something you can sort and total
- Pull the line items out of an invoice or purchase order for your books
- Get a price list or product table out of a supplier's PDF catalogue
- Lift the numbers from a financial or annual report without retyping them
- Rescue a data table from a research paper so you can chart it
What happens to your file
Your files are never stored. Nothing is parked, queued, or kept — the moment your download is ready, it's gone, and no one ever sees it.
Plenty of online tools store your file on their servers and delete it later. PDF Cubby doesn't keep it at all — there's nothing left behind to clean up afterward.
Features
- Figures come through as numbers, formatted as they looked — so totals and formulas work immediately, instead of arriving as text
- One sheet per table, headers bold and frozen, columns already sized
- Shows you what it found before you download, so you can drop what you don't want
- Won't invent tables — a page of ordinary paragraphs comes back as nothing found, not as rows of nonsense
- Works without ruling lines — statements laid out with plain spacing are read too
- Excel or CSV, whichever your next step needs
- 5 free a day — unlimited with Pro ($4.99/mo, cancel anytime)
- Never stored — files are gone the moment you're done
Tips
- Scanned statement or receipt? Run OCR first — a scan is a picture, so there's no table in it to read yet.
- Nothing found but you can see a table on the page? Tick Look harder for tables without lines and run it again — that's for tables held together by spacing alone.
- Dates are left as text on purpose. Guessing whether 03/04 means March or April is how a spreadsheet quietly ends up wrong.
- Only need a few pages? Pull them out with Extract Pages first and you'll get a much tidier workbook.
- Need the whole document editable rather than just its tables? PDF to Word is the one you want.
Frequently asked questions
- Will the table come out exactly right?
- Usually, and you get to check before you download. Tables drawn with ruling lines — invoices, reports, most forms — come through very reliably. Tables held together by spacing alone, like many bank statements, are read too but are more likely to need a column nudged afterwards. Because every table is previewed first, you see what you're getting rather than discovering it later.
- Are the numbers real numbers, or just text?
- Real numbers. A cell reading $1,204.55 in the PDF arrives as the figure 1204.55 formatted as currency, so it still looks the same but SUM and AVERAGE work on it straight away. This is the part most converters get wrong, and it's the difference between a spreadsheet and a picture of one.
- Can I convert a scanned PDF to Excel?
- Not directly. A scan holds pictures of text, so there's no table data in it to read. Run it through OCR first, then convert the result — that's the chain: scan, OCR, spreadsheet.
- What if my PDF has no tables in it?
- We tell you that, plainly, and hand you nothing. A tool that returns rows of chopped-up sentences for an ordinary document isn't being helpful — so this one checks whether a page genuinely has a table layout on it before reading one, and says so when it doesn't.
- Does it handle multi-page tables?
- Each page's table comes through as its own sheet. If one table runs across several pages, you'll get a sheet per page and can paste them together — which also means you can see exactly where each part came from.
- Can I get a CSV instead?
- Yes, choose CSV at the download step. Every table goes into one flat file, each marked with the page it came from, and it opens cleanly in Excel, Google Sheets and Numbers.
- Do I need an account?
- You get 5 free conversions a day with no account and no card. For unlimited use, sign in and upgrade to Pro — $4.99/month, cancel anytime.
- Are my files kept anywhere?
- No. Your PDF is read and discarded the instant your download is ready — never stored, never queued, and never seen by anyone.