Excel MCP Server

Excel MCP Server is an open-source MCP server by Haris that lets your agent create, read and edit Excel files: charts, PivotTables, formulas, tables and more. It's built on openpyxl, needs no Microsoft Excel, and runs on Windows, macOS and Linux. It's a community project, not a Microsoft product. What you can do with it - Create charts, including combos, trendlines and the Excel 2016 types such as waterfall, histogram, treemap and funnel - Build real PivotTables that Excel refreshes, with slicers, timelines and sparklines - Read and write cells, tables, formulas and dynamic arrays; a built-in engine calculates formulas, so values come back even for files never opened in Excel - Find out why a number is wrong: trace precedents and dependents, step through a formula, and run Goal Seek - Format ranges, add conditional formatting and data validation, and sort, filter, find and replace - Import and export CSV, and read the VBA in .xlsm files (writing VBA is opt-in) How it connects It runs on your machine with uv: uvx excel-mcp-server stdio. Add --allow-dir /path/to/workbooks to keep it to one folder (repeat the flag for more, or set EXCEL_FILES_PATH). Claude Desktop can install it from the .mcpb bundle in the project's releases, and the README has setup for Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code with GitHub Copilot, Codex, Gemini CLI and Devin Desktop. It can also run as a Streamable HTTP server on localhost. Good to know - --read-only offers only the tools that don't change files, and --tools limits it to the areas you need, to save context. - Without --allow-dir, any absolute path to an Excel file works. It only touches Excel files and never silently overwrites an existing workbook. - It works with .xlsx, .xlsm, .xltx and .xltm files, not legacy .xls. - It rejects formulas that reach the network or other programs, and it never runs macros.

• “Make a PivotTable of revenue by region and quarter from the Sales sheet.”

  1. describe_sheet
  2. create_pivot_table
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• “Add a waterfall chart of this year's cash flow.”

  1. create_chart
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• “Why is the total in Summary!F20 wrong? Trace where it comes from.”

  1. trace_formula