Comments come and go with no reason

[Sophie_Walker]

I am a professional writer/editor and mainly interact with external clients.  In the last months I have noticed that individual review comments come and go at random (i.e., I have not changed any setting in the 'review' tab).  Essentially, I cannot be sure that all comments are displaying when I open a document. Sometimes, I know I have seen a chain of comments on a particular issue and the next time I work on the document, only the first comment of the chain is showing. If I close the doc and re-open then the chain in question usually reappears but others may be missing.  This is highly problematic since document I work on may contain hundreds of comments.  Has anyone seen this happen?  Or maybe have an idea why this is happening/how to resolve?  Thank you in advance.

[#2]

@Sophie_Walker 

Which version of Word is this? And is it running under Windows or some other operating system? 

[#3]

Hi Stefan, sorry for the delay in replying. This is Word 2016 and it's running in Windows 10 Business.

[#4]

@Sophie_Walker There does appear to be an issue at the moment when multiple users are commenting on a document in SharePoint and it has been reported directly to the Microsoft Word Product Team.

However as you do not mention that you are working on the document in collaboration with others, your issue may be different.  If you can upload a document to a sharing site and put a link to it back here, I will take a look at the comments.xml component of the file to see if there is something in it that may be causing an issue.  (There have been instances where an unmatched bookmark tag in the comments.xml was preventing comments from appearing and something like that might be the issue with your document.)

[#5]

Hello Doug,

Thank you so much for your answer and for advising that it's been reported to the Microsoft Word Product Team. Is it the sort of case where it would be useful if additional people also report it?

It seems like the issue you mentioned could be my issue. Within my organisation, I alone work with a document but it it then shared externally via SharePoint (although with the instruction to not work with the document online). However, once it is shared, the client will very likely use Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, or similar to work on the document.

Unfortunately, I cannot upload the document since it's confidential but I will take a look into the comments.xml as you suggested.

[#6]

@Sophie_Walker While I have gone direct to my contact in the Word Product Team, it won't hurt, and could speed things along if others report the issue via the Feedback facility under Help.