Kelly Rowland's Microsoft Excel text mystery could finally be solved

Kelly Rowland could perhaps be finally justified for infamously using Microsoft Excel on her Nokia flip phone to text in her and Nelly's Dilemma music video.

In the 2002 scene where Rowland used the Microsoft computer program made for creating spreadsheets to type out her message for Nelly, she quickly threw her phone down in anger when he failed to respond.

The moment became an infamous meme as it left viewers confused as to why on earth Rowland would use Excel to send a text message via the spreadsheet.

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However, this may now be answered as TikToker and Excel expert Dan Strong (@xlninjadan) has broken down the way in which Rowland could have sent her message to Nelly.

"Twenty years ago, Kelly Rowland tried to message her boo using Microsoft Excel, but was she justified in doing that? Let's take a look," Strong said.

In the music video Rowland can be seen typing into a cell on a spreadsheet with her classic noughties Nokia keyboard flip phone: "WHERE YOU AT? HOLLA WHEN YOU GET THIS."

"But hear me out what if she was able to do this..." as the TikToker explained that with the hyperlink function "you can send more than just a link," can use the 'mail to' scheme to send the message via email.

So Strong detailed that Rowland may have typed out the following formula underneath her message:

"=HYPERLINK("mailto:babyboo@aol.com?subject=hey&body="&A1,"Send Email"

After the hyperlinked "Send Email," button was made, Rowland clicked on it to open up where an email with the message she typed out was ready to send to her boo and the singer just had to hit send.

Strong added: "Probably that part of the video was cut off for time purposes," due to the long formula to send the message.

The video has since received 1.3m views, 126,000 likes and thousands of comments on TikTok, as people shared their surprise to learn Rowland had this Excel trick up her sleeve all along.

One person wrote: "More people need to know about this I screamed when I first saw it."

"That’s exactly what I thought too. Poor Kelly," another person said.

Someone else added: "@kellyrowland was an excel master after all!!"

Even the Microsoft 365 official TikTok commented: "This wasn’t obvious?"

Meanwhile, the TikTok has also gone viral on Twitter with 375,000 views, and 25,000 likes as @joshua_j123 posted the clip with the caption: "The Kelly Rowland/Excel mystery has finally been resolved."

People on Twitter were similarly stunned with this latest development.

However, there may be some flaws to this theory as firstly, people have noted that the hyperlink function was added in 2007 - five years after the Dilemma music video.

While Rowland herself has been asked about the infamous scene and it turns out she doesn't know what Microsoft Excel is, putting into question whether she would've typed out the formula Strong mentioned.

Speaking on US chat show The Real in 2019, the singer was asked by host Jeannie Mai: "I know you’ve seen the memes from the Dilemma video, where you’ve got caught in a shot texting Nelly.

"I just want you to clear the air here, because you’re on The Real. Why were you using Microsoft Excel to send this text?"

“Here’s the sitch, ok,” Rowland replied. “I don’t know what that is. I don’t know what Microsoft Excel is, I don’t have a clue."

"So when I saw all those memes I was like, ‘I don’t care!’ [I’m] literally thinking, what is it?"

After the clip was shared on Twitter, the official Microsoft Excel account seized the perfect opportunity to troll Rowland as it tweeted: "@KELLYROWLAND No matter what you do, we're crazy over you."

But if Smart's TikTok is right, we definitely all owe Rowland an apology.

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