Review comments disappeared

Anonymous
2014-05-04T12:30:54+00:00

So I've spend long hours addressing student coursework, giving comments on their projects.  They said the comments wouldn't work so I re-opened their documents and they appear to be correct.  Where are all my comments gone?  The actual comment boxes are still there but they are empty.  This is incredibly annoying.  Can I get them back or have they gone forever?  Screen shot provided for reference.

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  1. Anonymous
    2018-11-10T18:50:44+00:00

    I've tried many of these suggestions without success. Currently have 20+ documents that I graded, track changes saved and continue to appear but comments do not save. When I convert file from docx to doc the comments will save, but I want to recover the 20+ documents worth of comments, if possible, and figure out why this all of a sudden happened - help! (Mac OS Mojave, Word 2007).

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  2. Doug Robbins - MVP - Office Apps and Services 323.6K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2018-08-29T23:52:15+00:00

    If you have a file with that problem, send it to me and I should be able to fix it.

    If the document is not too large to attach to an email message, send me a copy of it that way, referencing this thread in the covering email message.

    Alternatively, upload a copy of the document to the following folder of my OneDrive

    https://1drv.ms/f/s!AmuIXmFDy-1a8nP3RpgnYHp-5zXK

    and send me an email to the address shown in my signature to let me know that it is there.

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  3. Anonymous
    2018-08-29T13:16:55+00:00

    Trouble is Patricia, the file looks okay until you send it, then the receiving party finds it is missing comments. BTW, you can unzip by changing file extension directly from .docx to .zip - Windows magic (presumably a de-zipper) does the rest.

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  4. Anonymous
    2018-08-29T13:11:08+00:00

    Many thanks Patricia, this was the best answer and solved my problem.

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  5. Doug Robbins - MVP - Office Apps and Services 323.6K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2018-08-16T22:09:53+00:00

    Yes, I have been able to restore the comments by accessing the comments.xml component of the file and removing an errant bookmark.

    I am not the least bit interested in the content of your document and you can rest assured that I will not make it available to anyone else and will delete it after returning a copy to you.

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