Excelreadmcp

🚀 ExcelReadMCP

ExcelReadMCP is a dedicated server for reading Excel files from Model Context Protocol-compliant clients such as Cursor and GitHub Copilot. It specializes in reading and searching, and does not provide writing or formatting operations.

🚀 Quick Start

✨ Features

ExcelReadMCP offers the following tools for interacting with Excel files:

⚠️ Important Note

For all tools, please specify an absolute path for file_path. Passing a relative path will result in an error.

📦 Installation

Common Setup

cd <path-to-ExcelReadMCP>
python -m venv .venv
.venv\Scripts\activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

💡 Usage Tip

For example, if you extract the folder to C:\Projects\ExcelReadMCP, run the following commands in PowerShell in order: cd C:\Projects\ExcelReadMCP → python -m venv .venv → .\.venv\Scripts\Activate.ps1 → pip install -r requirements.txt.

⚠️ Important Note

Since the official mcp package (current stable version is 1.18.0) is used as the MCP library, requirements.txt specifies a version equal to or higher than that.

Setup in Cursor

1. Open mcp_config.json and replace <path-to-ExcelReadMCP> with the actual absolute path.
2. Append the content to the MCP configuration file referenced by Cursor (e.g., %USERPROFILE%\.cursor\mcp.json).
3. Restart Cursor and confirm that excel-read-mcp is displayed in Settings > Features > MCP.
4. Use Composer (Ctrl + I) to give an instruction like "Get the list of sheets in C:\path\to\workbook.xlsx" to confirm that the tools can be used.

Setup in GitHub Copilot

1. Open mcp_config.json and replace <path-to-ExcelReadMCP> with the actual absolute path.
2. On Windows, edit %APPDATA%\GitHub Copilot\mcp.json and append the configuration for excel-read-tools (create a new file if it doesn't exist).
3. Restart VS Code and confirm that excel-read-tools is displayed in the Copilot Chat tool list.
4. Give an instruction like "Check the content of C:\path\to\workbook.xlsx" in Copilot Chat to test the tool's response.

Starting the Server

cd <path-to-ExcelReadMCP>
start_mcp_server.bat

If a virtual environment exists, the Python in .venv will be used; otherwise, the system's python will be used.