Review comments disappeared

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.

Also having this problem (in Word 2016).  I open the manuscript, as I do each day, and it says it won't open--Word has found an error that in the details option is described simply as "Comments"--so when I finally get it to open it has ERASED EVERY SINGLE COMMENT.  Comment bubbles are still there, sitting empty.  Need a better solution than "make sure 'All Markup'" is selected.  Not my first day--all my settings are correct and I need to know if I've just lost months of work here or if there is a way to restore the comments.

Had this problem, my solution is sort of brute force

I opened the broken DOCX file with LIBRE office writer, all the comments appered. I saved it as a .DOCX file. When I opened the resulting document in word the comments were back. The comment format changed a little but for my purposes that was fine.

Did you ever solve this? It's just happened to me. Comments and also footnotes completely empty! I'm a super-user of Word, not a newbie. I've never had anything like it. Aggghhh. :(

I am having the same issue.

PDF would not help when I expect a different contributor to edit and add comments.

If comments don't show as expected, make sure that the Display for Review drop down (found in the Tracking group on the Review tab) is set to "All Markup."

"All Markup" resembles the display of markup in Word 2007 and 2010. Does that help? If not, you will have to explain in detail what you are trying to accomplish.

Note that "All Markup" is a sticky option; that is, it should stay selected even if you exit Word or open a different document.