In 2002, Hip Hop and Pop artists, Nelly and Kelly Rowland collaborated and came out with the smooth R&B classic - Dilemma.
Even 15 year old me bought a copy back then which I still have to this day.
The song explores Nelly getting thirsty for his MILF neighbour - aka Kelly Rowland - who’s already with someone and has a son (look up the lyrics to the first verse and you’ll see what I mean).
But the real sexy part of the song is actually 3 minutes and 14 seconds into the music video when Kelly Rowland appears to send her partner a text message using Microsoft Excel - she writes "WHERE YOU AT? HOLLA WHEN YOU GET THIS". She then gets visibly upset because he never hollas back.
The internet picked up on this and massively ridiculed her because you can’t send text messages over Microsoft Excel...or can you?
In this article, I’m here to defend Kelly Rowland’s honour by showing you how to send an SMS with Microsoft Excel on your phone, thus demonstrating that she did send that text message to her boo, but he chose not to reply which then pissed her off.
The things we need for this are:
- Microsoft Excel 2013 or later,
- Access to an SMS Service Provider, and
- Chrome Remote Desktop.
Excel 2013 or later - we need this specifically because that’s when a function called WEBSERVICE was introduced, and all WEBSERVICE does is let us access a website within Excel - kind of like a web browser. But instead of showing the graphical version of a website with all the pretty pictures, videos and text, WEBSERVICE shows you the website’s HTML code.
The second thing we need is access to an online SMS Service Provider’s API that lets us send a text message using a Get URL, so we can paste that URL into our Excel WEBSERVICE function.
The one I found that works best is a site called SMSGlobal.com - it’s free to signup and you get 5 free SMSes to start with.
(Disclaimer: I have no affiliation to smsglobal.com)
I then checked their developer documentation, and found the sample URL we need to send text messages. Make note of this URL - we’ll come back to it in a minute.
So the next thing to do is to sign up and login to your account. When you’ve done that, click on API & Integrations on the left, and make note of your username and password under Master API Key.
We’ll then go back to our developer documentation and substitute the following values into the GET Request URL.
- testuser with our username, and
- secret with our password
- then we’ll put Kelly into the from value,
- then change the to value, to our own number
- and finally, we’ll update the text to WHERE YOU AT? HOLLA WHEN YOU GET THIS
If you did that correctly, you should get a response code like this in your browser, and an SMS from Kelly.
Awesome! We’re half way there.
Now copy the URL into Microsoft Excel and paste it into Cell A2. We’ll then change it to a formula by putting an equals at the start, wrapping the URL in double quotes, and updating the text message part to cell A1 - that’s where Kelly Rowland typed her message, so that’s where we’ll type ours.
In cell A3, we’ll then type in =WEBSERVICE(A2) and press Enter.
So every time we update our text message in A1, it gets appended to the URL in A2, and then A3 will use WEBSERVICE to send a text message to our number.
Lastly, you can make the text colour white on A2 and A3 to make it look cleaner.
Now that we can do this in Excel, we just need to put it on our phone.
I initially thought of using Excel for Android, but that doesn’t have the WEBSERVICE function.
So, the next easiest way I could think of was to use Chrome Remote Desktop to access my PC from my phone.
And this is the final product.
Now, obviously this article was just for fun because the technology here like the SMS Service Provider, Excel’s WEBSERVICE, and Chrome Remote Desktop, were created years after the song came out.
I mean, in 2002, you maybe could have done this with VBA code but it still wouldn’t work on your phone.
Either way, it just goes to show that 2002 Kelly Rowland was way ahead of her time and a forward thinker.
To me, she’s basically the Elon Musk of Microsoft Excel.
So instead of ridiculing her Excel skills, the question should now be, why didn’t Kelly’s boo reply to her text message?