Your agent can summarize a meeting transcript in seconds. Impressive. But can it open the actual Word doc in OneDrive or SharePoint, update the project status spreadsheet, and add three slides to the quarterly deck?
No. It can’t. Because until now, there was no reliable way for an agent to touch Microsoft Office files.
That changes today. We’re shipping five new Arcade Optimized MCP servers that give your agent full read and write access across Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneDrive, and SharePoint.
Not wrappers. Not stubs. Real, production-grade tools that follow proven tool design patterns, handle binary file formats, session management, concurrent edits, and the OAuth maze that is Microsoft Graph — so you don’t have to.
The Pain Behind the Curtain
Here’s what actually happens when an enterprise user asks an agent to “update the Q4 forecast spreadsheet.”
The agent needs to authenticate with Microsoft using the right OAuth scopes. Then it has to figure out whether the file lives in the user’s OneDrive or a SharePoint drive — because the Graph API endpoints and permissions are completely different for each. Then it downloads a binary .xlsx blob, parses it, makes the changes, handles pagination if the sheet has more than a few hundred rows, and uploads it back — ideally without overwriting someone else’s edits.
That’s not a weekend project. That’s weeks of infrastructure work before you write a single line of agent logic.
And this is 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.
Most teams give up and tell the user to copy-paste.
What We Shipped
Five MCP servers, over 30 new tools, covering the full Microsoft Office surface:
OneDrive
Your agent’s file system. Browse, search, create folders, move, copy, delete, and share files — all 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 supported by MS PowerPoint
- 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. Same capabilities, different API surface — because Microsoft uses different endpoints and OAuth scopes for files stored in SharePoint document libraries versus OneDrive.
Not you nor your Agent should have to care about that distinction. Now you don’t.
Why This Is Hard To Get Done 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? 4MB (how frequently do Excel and PowerPoint files exceed that? Yeah, almost always). Your code needs to handle both.
We ate all of this complexity so you don’t have to. It’s all abstracted behind simple interfaces tailored for LLM-powered Agents to use. Every tool is hand-crafted — designed for how agents actually work, not how the Graph API happens to be structured.
What Your Agent Can Actually Do Now
Think about the workflows this unlocks:
- Pull the latest sales data from an Excel workbook in SharePoint, analyze trends, and update the summary sheet — all in one conversation
- Draft a project proposal in Word, complete with sections and formatting, saved directly to the right OneDrive folder
- Read a 40-slide presentation and generate a concise executive summary with speaker notes for every slide
- Create a new Excel report with formulas, populate it from an API, and drop it into a shared folder
- Append meeting notes to a living Word document after every standup
These aren’t demos. These are the repetitive, document-heavy workflows that eat hours out of every knowledge worker’s week.
Get Started
All five MCP servers are available now in Arcade’s catalog:
Connect them 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.
Your agent already knows how to think. Now it can put its brilliance to work to make your users’ lives much easier automating Microsoft Office-related tasks.
