Most AI agents can summarize a meeting transcript in seconds. But ask one to open the actual Word doc, update the project status spreadsheet, and add three slides to the quarterly deck? There’s never been a reliable way for an agent to touch Microsoft Office files. Until now.

Arcade’s Microsoft Office 365 MCP servers give your agent full read and write access across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneDrive, and SharePoint. Over 30 tools, covering the full Microsoft Office surface. Not wrappers. Not stubs. Real, production-grade tools that handle binary file formats, session management, concurrent edits, and the OAuth maze that is Microsoft Graph — so you don’t have to.

Why Agents Can’t Access Microsoft Office Files Today

When an enterprise user asks an agent to “update the Q4 forecast spreadsheet,” something has to authenticate with Microsoft using the right OAuth scopes, figure out whether the file lives in OneDrive or SharePoint (different API endpoints, different permission requirements), download a binary .xlsx blob, parse it, make the changes, handle pagination if the sheet has more than a few hundred rows, and upload it back without overwriting someone else’s edits.

And that’s just Excel. Word documents are binary too. PowerPoint files have slide layouts, speaker notes, and content placeholders to deal with. Multiply by two if the files are in SharePoint.

That’s not a weekend project. That’s weeks of infrastructure work before you write a single line of agent logic. Most teams give up and tell the user to copy-paste.

What We Shipped

Five MCP servers covering the full Microsoft Office surface.

OneDrive: Your agent’s file system. Browse, search, create folders, move, copy, delete, and share files through the user’s own OneDrive.

  • List and search files across personal and shared drives
  • Create folders, move and copy items
  • Generate sharing links
  • Full pagination support for large directories

Microsoft Word: Read and write .docx documents without touching a binary parser.

  • Read any Word document as clean Markdown
  • Create new documents with initial content
  • Append text to existing documents
  • Concurrency-safe: uses etag-based conflict detection so your agent won’t clobber someone else’s edits

Microsoft Excel: The deepest of the five. Create workbooks, read cell data, write values and formulas, and manage worksheets.

  • Create workbooks with optional initial data
  • Read worksheet data with pagination — handles sheets with thousands of rows
  • Update individual cells or entire ranges in a single request
  • Full formula support (=SUM(A1:A10) works exactly how you’d expect)
  • Add, rename, and delete worksheets
  • Session management built in — no stale reads, no propagation surprises

Microsoft PowerPoint: Build and read presentations slide by slide.

  • Create presentations with a title slide
  • Add slides with several layout options
  • Markdown formatting in slide bodies and speaker notes (bold, italic, underline, nested bullets)
  • Read entire presentations as LLM-friendly Markdown
  • Get and set speaker notes per slide or all at once

SharePoint: Every Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneDrive tool above has a corresponding version in the SharePoint MCP server. Microsoft uses different endpoints and OAuth scopes for files stored in SharePoint document libraries versus OneDrive. You shouldn’t have to care about that distinction. Neither should your agent.

Why This Is Hard to Get Right

The Microsoft Graph API is powerful, but building agent-ready tools on top of it is genuinely painful.

  • Auth scope fragmentation. OneDrive files need Files.Read and Files.ReadWrite. The same files in SharePoint need Sites.Read.All and Sites.ReadWrite.All. Get it wrong and your user sees a cryptic 403.
  • Binary file formats. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files aren’t text. Your agent can’t just read and edit them. Each format requires specialized parsing and re-assembly.
  • Concurrency control. Office files get edited by multiple people simultaneously. Without etag-based conflict detection, your agent silently overwrites someone else’s work.
  • Session management. Excel’s Graph API requires workbook sessions to avoid stale reads and propagation delays. Miss this and your writes vanish.
  • Upload complexity. Small files use simple upload. Large files need resumable upload sessions. The cutoff is 4MB — and Office files exceed that constantly. Your code needs to handle both.

Arcade absorbs all of this. Every tool is optimized for how agents actually work, not how the Graph API happens to be structured.

What Workflows This Unlocks

Document-heavy workflows that eat hours out of every knowledge worker’s week are now actually possible.

  • Pull the latest sales data from an Excel workbook in SharePoint, analyze trends, and update the summary sheet in one conversation.
  • Draft a project proposal in Word with full formatting, saved directly to the right OneDrive folder.
  • Read a 40-slide presentation and generate an executive summary with speaker notes.
  • Create a new Excel report with formulas, populate it from an API, and drop it into a shared folder.

Get Started

All five MCP servers are available in Arcade’s catalog:

Connect the servers through an MCP Gateway, point your agent at the tools, and let your users authenticate with their own Microsoft accounts. Arcade handles the tokens, the scopes, and the lifecycle. Start building today.