How do I create footnotes on an excel spreadsheet?

Maybe that's one of those "depends on what a footnote is" questions; but here's something that worked (today) for me.

(It so happened that) first I created a fully formatted table in MSO Word. Next, I copied the entire table, footnotes and end notes included (don't worry if the notes text matter does not highlight; they will be added to the clip board), and pasted it into a fresh Excel worksheet.

Now, I won't say whether they were still bonafide note references (in the sense of uniform publications standards & practices), or had been converted into something more Excel-like, but they did still operate like, and had all the look and feel of, actual footnotes and end notes!

I did find that the notes text matter had been pasted into the column (in my case, column A) corresponding to the left most column (column 1) of the source table (in which they had originally been wrapped and merged across the table width's worth of cells) - the reference links stayed in corresponding cells where they belong. However, the "merge-across attibutes" in the table did not transfer on clipboard from table to spreadsheet. So, it was necessary to repeat the merge-across-cells formatting for each note using Excel's (Office's) cell-alignment formatting commands.

Once cut/copied and pasted from Word to Excel, the notes features worked just the same...simply clicking to move back and forth between reference and note.

The downside? (1) You are stuck with only the notes reference links created in Word, so you can't add new (bottom) notes - that is to say, linked notes - in Excel. (2) Reformatting of the worksheet is apt to disrupt/disable links between note references and note text matter. I have not figured how, if possible at all [Anyone out there know this??], to protect "reference-to-note" link connections in Excel.

Suggestion: This "method" probably best for spreadsheets with not overly complex formatting and not needing more than minimal reformatting of the spreadsheet.

Commiseration: I do agree that Office Commentary is a less than optimal substitution for foot/end notes. Maybe a future Excel edition will incorporate Word-like reference features.