sharepoint-excel-mcp

MCP server that gives an AI agent read access to Excel files stored in SharePoint and OneDrive for Business, turning a permission-matrix spreadsheet into structured JSON.

Built for a QA automation flow: a test-case-writing agent reads Jira stories, each story references a permission matrix as a SharePoint link, and this server is what turns that link into data the agent can reason over — unattended, with no user sign-in.

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Contents

• Quick start
• Azure app registration
• Permissions ← read this one
• Registering with Claude
• Tools
• Behaviour worth knowing
• Troubleshooting
• Limitations
• Development

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Quick start

npm install
cp .env.example .env      # then fill in TENANT_ID / CLIENT_ID / CLIENT_SECRET
npm run build

npm run doctor -- "<your sharepoint link>"   # verify the whole chain

No Azure tenant yet? Everything below runs offline:

npm run mock              # full tool flow against fixtures
npm run mock -- --wac     # same, forcing the download fallback
npm run doctor -- --mock "https://contoso.sharepoint.com/:x:/s/QA/T?e=1"
npm test

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Azure app registration

1. Entra admin centre → App registrations → New registration. Name it, choose Accounts in this organizational directory only, leave the redirect URI blank — this is an app-only flow with no sign-in.
2. Copy the Directory (tenant) ID and Application (client) ID from the Overview page into .env.
3. Certificates & secrets → New client secret. Copy the secret Value immediately — not the Secret ID. It is shown once and cannot be retrieved later.
4. API permissions → Add a permission → Microsoft Graph → Application permissions. Add one of the permissions described below.
5. Grant admin consent for the directory. Without this, every Graph call fails with 403 no matter how correct the code is.

Admin consent is an external dependency. If you are not a Global Admin or Privileged Role Admin you cannot grant it yourself, and no amount of retrying will work around it. A 403 almost always means this step is outstanding.

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Permissions

This is the part that decides how the server behaves, so it is worth understanding rather than copying.

The situation

Microsoft's own documentation for the Excel endpoints (worksheets, usedRange) states "Application: Not supported", and the Excel overview documents only delegated scopes.

In practice app-only access does work with tenant-wide Sites.Read.All. Under Sites.Selected it commonly fails with:

403 — Could not obtain a WAC access token

So the server has two read paths and picks automatically.

Option A — Sites.Selected (default, least privilege)

Graph permission	Sites.Selected (Application)
Access scope	Only sites you explicitly grant
Excel Workbook API	Usually unavailable (WAC 403)
Read path used	Download .xlsx + parse

After granting admin consent, grant the app access to each site:

# Find the site ID
GET https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/sites/{tenant}.sharepoint.com:/sites/{siteName}

# Grant this app read access to that site
POST https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/sites/{siteId}/permissions
{
  "roles": ["read"],
  "grantedToIdentities": [
    { "application": { "id": "<CLIENT_ID>", "displayName": "sharepoint-excel-mcp" } }
  ]
}

A WAC 403 under this option is expected and is not a misconfiguration. It means the download fallback engaged and everything is working. npm run doctor reports it as an informational branch, not a failure.

Option B — Sites.Read.All (workbook API available)

Graph permission	Sites.Read.All (Application)
Access scope	Every SharePoint site in the tenant
Excel Workbook API	Available
Read path used	usedRange directly

More capable and avoids downloading files, but it is a tenant-wide read grant. Your security team may reasonably refuse it.

Which to choose

Start with A. Both paths produce byte-identical output — there is a test asserting exactly that — so the only differences are latency and breadth of access. Move to B only if the download fallback proves too slow for your file sizes.

OneDrive / personal sites

Files under https://{tenant}-my.sharepoint.com/personal/... are not supported. Sites.Selected does not reach personal OneDrive, and it resolves through a different Graph path. Put the matrix in a SharePoint site document library.

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Registering with Claude

claude mcp add sharepoint-excel \
  --env TENANT_ID=<tenant-id> \
  --env CLIENT_ID=<client-id> \
  --env CLIENT_SECRET=<client-secret> \
  -- node /absolute/path/to/share-point-mcp/dist/index.js

Run npm run build first. For development you can point at tsx src/index.ts instead of the built output.

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Tools

resolve_link(link)

Converts a link into stable driveId / itemId.

{ "driveId": "b!…", "itemId": "01…", "name": "matrix.xlsx", "webUrl": "https://…" }

Call this once and reuse the IDs. Sharing links expire and get revoked; resolving one costs an extra Graph round trip on every call.

Three link shapes are accepted:

Shape	Example
Sharing link	…/:x:/s/QA/EYt_abc123?e=xY9z
Direct path	…/sites/QA/Shared Documents/matrix.xlsx
Library view	…/AllItems.aspx?id=%2Fsites%2FQA%2F…

list_excel_sheets(link | driveId+itemId)

Worksheet names. Uncapped.

describe_sheet(ref, sheet?, headerRow?)

Headers, total row count, and up to 3 sample rows — no full data dump. This is the intended first call against an unfamiliar matrix: see the shape, then build a targeted filter.

get_permission_matrix(ref, sheet?, headerRow?, maxRows?, offset?, columns?, filter?)

The main tool. Uses the header row as keys.

{
  "file": "matrix.xlsx", "sheet": "Permission Matrix",
  "headers": ["Role", "Module", "Delete"],
  "rowCount": 8, "returnedCount": 3, "offset": 0, "truncated": true,
  "hint": "Showing 3 of 8 matching rows. Narrow with `filter` or `columns` first…",
  "records": [ { "Role": "Admin", "Module": "Billing", "Delete": true } ]
}

• maxRows — default 500
• offset — for paging
• columns — project to a subset; large saving on wide matrices
• filter — { column, equals? , contains? }, case-insensitive

rowCount is the number of rows matching the filter, not the sheet size.

get_cell_range(ref, sheet, range)

Raw values for an explicit A1 range like "A1:D20", for sheets whose layout does not fit the header-row model.

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Behaviour worth knowing

maxRows / offset / filter / columns are applied client-side

They bound what the agent receives, not what crosses the network. usedRange returns the entire grid regardless, so maxRows: 10 on a 50,000-row sheet still transfers all 50,000 rows.

This matters because the parameter names strongly imply server-side paging, and the gap only shows up as unexplained latency on a large sheet. If you need to genuinely bound the transfer, use get_cell_range with an explicit address — that is the tool that actually does it.

Dates come back as Excel serial numbers

A date cell reads as 45292, not "2024-01-01". That is what Graph's usedRange returns, and the download fallback normalizes to match so the two paths cannot be told apart. Convert on the consuming side: new Date(Date.UTC(1899, 11, 30) + serial * 86400000).

Dates before 1900-03-01 are off by one, because Excel reproduces a Lotus 1-2-3 bug that treats 1900 as a leap year. Not corrected — see the test that pins it.

Blank cells are empty strings

"", not null — again matching Graph. Fully blank rows are dropped entirely.

Header normalization

Real matrices have messy header rows, and both failure modes are silent:

Input	Becomes	Why
" Role "	Role	trimmed
"" (blank)	column_C	named by its real sheet column
Role, Role	Role, Role_2	duplicates would otherwise overwrite

The 25 MB download ceiling

Under the fallback path, files above MAX_DOWNLOAD_BYTES (default 25 MB) are refused before the transfer starts. exceljs loads the whole workbook into memory; an OOM would kill the stdio transport and surface to the agent as a connection drop rather than a readable error.

Timeouts

30 s on Graph calls, 60 s on the download. A timeout is reported as its own error type naming the request, and is not retried — 429 and 5xx are retried up to 3 times, 403 never is.

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Troubleshooting

Run the doctor first. It walks every leg and tells you which one broke:

npm run doctor -- "<your link>"

1. Configuration          2. Link                3. Access token
4. Resolve to driveItem   5. Workbook API        6. usedRange
7. Download fallback      → Verdict

It exits non-zero only when neither read path works.

Symptom	Meaning
Missing required environment variable	.env not filled in
401 at step 3	Wrong tenant/client ID, or the secret's ID was copied instead of its Value, or it expired
403 at step 4	Admin consent not granted, or the site not granted under Sites.Selected
404 at step 4	Link revoked or expired. Confirm it opens in a browser — a revoked link and a bad share-ID encoding are indistinguishable from the response
Yellow • at steps 5–6	Expected under Sites.Selected. Fallback engaged, nothing to fix
403 at step 5 that is not yellow	A genuine consent problem, not a WAC issue

npm run encode -- "<link>" prints the share ID and the exact Graph request to paste into Graph Explorer — useful for isolating an encoding problem from a permissions one.

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Limitations

• .xlsx only. .xls and .csv are not supported by the Excel REST APIs.
• No consumer OneDrive. Business platform only.
• No personal OneDrive sites (/personal/…). Use a SharePoint site library.
• Read-only. No write tools, by design.
• Dates are Excel serials; pre-1900-03-01 dates are off by one.

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Development

npm test          # 181 tests, no network
npm run typecheck # strict, includes tests and scripts
npm run lint
npm run dev       # run the server from source
npm run fixtures  # regenerate the .xlsx test fixture

Layout

src/
  index.ts          MCP server + tool registration, nothing else
  config.ts         env parsing, fail-fast validation
  logger.ts         stderr-only logger
  auth.ts           token acquisition, caching, single-flight
  graph.ts          authed fetch, retry, error mapping, redaction
  links.ts          pure: link classification + share-ID encoding
  sharepoint.ts     resolution + the two-path read
  xlsx-fallback.ts  download + exceljs parse + cell normalization
  transform.ts      pure: grid → records

Testing approach

Pure logic (share-ID encoding, link parsing, the transform pipeline, cell normalization) is unit tested with no network. Graph interactions run against a routing stub and recorded fixtures. server.test.ts drives the real server through an in-memory MCP client, which catches registration mistakes unit tests cannot see.

The most important test is cross-path equivalence: the same fixture is read via the workbook API and via the download fallback, and the results must be deeply equal. Testing each path alone cannot catch a divergence between them — and it caught a real one during development.

Nothing in npm test touches the network. Only npm run doctor talks to Azure.

Stdout is the protocol

Under StdioServerTransport, stdout carries JSON-RPC frames. A stray console.log in src/ corrupts the stream and breaks the server with an opaque parse error on the client. All logging goes to stderr via logger.ts, enforced by an eslint no-console rule on src/**. Scripts under scripts/ are exempt — they are CLIs.