Review comments disappeared

Hello,

I recently had a user experience this issue with a file they had stored on our SharePoint 2013 on premise instance. The issue turned out to not be a SharePoint issue, but a corrupt file.

The easiest way to repair this was to open the file with LibreOffice an open source file editor. This tool is known to have less issues with corrupt files. I lucked out, and the users file opened with all of the missing comments. I could then save a new copy, and the issue was resolved.

Thanks for the quick informative reply, Stefan. I am new to the concept of a user forum and will need to learn what I can hope to gain from it. In anycase, I cannot share the current document that I'm having issues with because it is confifdential information. Perhaps when I get past this, I can take some time to make a mock up. But the very first entry in this thread, made a year ago, clearly shows exactly the problem I have. Comments are carefully entered in the document. Then they inexplicabley dissapear. Does anyone now how to fix this? 

I can say that my frustration that may be apparent stems from having more MSO surprises pop up when in the midst of doing important time sensitive work. But it is also not only having paid thousands of dollars over years of buying/supporting MSO products, and also being a shareholder, but seeing that they continually make inexplicable changes to the products that require training to learn. I have also taken many classes and paid trainers spending hours in training and retraining to learn the latest excel updates. It frustrates me that MSO dosn't fix or make the most basic logstanding goofy outdated things more intuitivre or user friendly, before doing so. (just for example - why do I need implement the developer feature to use a basic checkbox. In this day, every other app has this feature.

So why are there no real people that work for MSO who can respond directly to the user questions? Microsoft's stock has been consistantly showing a profit for years. Why can't they give back and provide real time support. Why do they have to relay on dedicated volnteers like yourself to fix or provide workarounds  for the the flaws and explain how to use obscure features?

Note that no one in this thread is working for Microsoft (as far as I can tell). This is a user-to-user forum.

I'm afraid that consistent steps to reproduce will be required for Microsoft to have a closer look at this.

If you are seeing this in a specific document, you can share that document with the forum.

I have the same question on the same frustrating results. This is absurd that the notes randomly dissapear for no apparent reason. I'm in the midst of writing a novel and in a writers group in which we share work with comments. How to get real help on this real failure from MSWord? Please MSW staff, don't simply reply with, 'can't recreate the same results.' Simply listen to your paying, frustrated, customers and find a way to fix the flaw.

Thank you

The company where I work has upgraded to Office 2016 and this started happening a lot, which is a major issue as a handful of people work in the same document and we rely on comments displaying correctly. The only solution I found so far, which works in most cases (but not all), is to uncompress the Word file and edit the comments.xml file inside the word folder - certainly not something a beginner user will be able to do do.

I used 7-Zip to uncompress the Word file, "Open inside" and you will be able to see the contents of the file. In the word folder open comments.xml in a text editor and search for "<w:bookmarkStart". The whole lines needs to be deleted up to the closing bracket "/>". For example, in my file that would be <w:bookmarkStart w:id="219" w:name="_Hlk484981214"/>. I normally copy the comments.xml file to my desktop, edit it then copy it back to the original location, replacing the corrupt comments.xml file. This fix the Word file instantly and all missing comments reappear.

In some instances I wasn't able to repair the file as the data for the comments had actually disappeared from the comments.xml file. So far I've been able to repair files where the comment data exists but is not displaying because of an error in the code (the bookmarkStart line).

I hope this helps some people. I'm looking around for a better solution, ideally to stop the file becoming corrupt in the first place, as this fix is too complicated for the average Word user to use and also doesn't work if the comments data has disappeared from the xml file.