Bug 161142 - DATA LOSS!!! Libreoffice calc comments vanished
Summary: DATA LOSS!!! Libreoffice calc comments vanished
Status: NEW
Alias: None
Product: LibreOffice
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Calc (show other bugs)
Version:
(earliest affected)
6.4.7.2 release
Hardware: All All
: medium major
Assignee: Not Assigned
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords: dataLoss
Depends on:
Blocks: Calc-Comments
  Show dependency treegraph
 
Reported: 2024-05-16 23:35 UTC by ralf.fehlau
Modified: 2025-06-23 14:10 UTC (History)
8 users (show)

See Also:
Crash report or crash signature:


Attachments
Spreadsheet that lost comments as per reported bug above (162.87 KB, application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.spreadsheet)
2024-09-12 21:03 UTC, Paul Temple
Details

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Description ralf.fehlau 2024-05-16 23:35:14 UTC
Description:
As the title says, the comments in arbitrary cells of a calc document have vanished!

I have a document with serious data which I use dayly. Today I have seen, that random data dissapeared.

Steps to Reproduce:
no hint why this happened.

Actual Results:
comments randomly vanished

Expected Results:
NO DATA LOSS , of course!


Reproducible: Always


User Profile Reset: No

Additional Info:
[Information automatically included from LibreOffice]
Locale: de
Module: SpreadsheetDocument
[Information guessed from browser]
OS: Linux (All)
OS is 64bit: yes
Comment 1 Stéphane Guillou (stragu) 2024-05-17 03:55:57 UTC
Sorry that happened to you.

I understand it wasn't all the comments in all the sheets?
Note that there is a command to remove all comments: Sheet > Cell Comments > Delete all comments. That action does not currently ask to confirm, please see bug 160219.

Unfortunately, without more precise steps to reproduce the issue (format used, commands used), and possibly a sample document attached here, we won't be able to investigate.

Furthermore, version 6.4 is not maintained anymore, so please update to a currently maintained version, preferably 24.2.
Please let us know if you still experience the issue, and if that's the case, provide more details.

Thank you!
Comment 2 ralf.fehlau 2024-05-17 12:34:31 UTC
I cannot provide a document, because it contains private data.

This libreoffice version runs on ubuntu 20.04 LTS. :-(

I found a backup copy from january which contains the comments of the recent years. Nevertheless there is plenty of work to recover the data for this year. I guess several weeks of work.

The cells, who loose the comments are random, full last column is lost, and several rows are complete / partially lost, whithout any rule. I'm a c/c++/java developer ... and I will not imagine, what happend to my data.
Comment 3 m_a_riosv 2024-05-17 17:13:35 UTC
What file format do you use to save?
Comment 4 Paul Temple 2024-08-19 17:28:06 UTC
Adding my comment as instructed in https://ask.libreoffice.org/t/all-comments-in-my-calc-spreadsheet-have-disappeared-2024/109549 by fpy.

I use the same spreadsheet daily, for hours on end. Today, for no apparent reason, all the comments disappeared. I have checked if the comments are marked as viewable in Options and they are. I can create and delete new comments. My spreadsheet is of .ods type.

How do I get the missing comments back?

Version: 24.2.5.2 (X86_64) / LibreOffice Community
Build ID: bffef4ea93e59bebbeaf7f431bb02b1a39ee8a59
CPU threads: 8; OS: Windows 10.0 Build 22631; UI render: Skia/Vulkan; VCL: win
Locale: en-GB (en_GB); UI: en-GB
Calc: threaded
Comment 5 Paul Temple 2024-08-19 17:57:24 UTC
Sorry, I didn't think to add this before but saw a part of an earlier comment and can therefore add...

I can make my document available if that would help. I can even make an earlier version available that will presumably [jopefully] still contain comments. But I would need an email address to send it to as I'm not happy to post the document publicly.
Comment 6 Buovjaga 2024-09-12 06:36:34 UTC
Ralf and Paul, please refer to this and attach an anonymised document that still shows the issue: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA/Bugzilla/Sanitizing_Files_Before_Submission
Comment 7 Paul Temple 2024-09-12 21:03:26 UTC
Created attachment 196413 [details]
Spreadsheet that lost comments as per reported bug above

Re email sent to me "[Bug 161142] DATA LOSS!!! Libreoffice calc comments vanished" on 12 Sept 2024, requesting the sanitized spreadsheet

File is a LibreOffice Calc spreadsheet
Comment 8 Buovjaga 2024-09-15 15:19:16 UTC
(In reply to Paul Temple from comment #7)
> Created attachment 196413 [details]
> Spreadsheet that lost comments as per reported bug above
> 
> Re email sent to me "[Bug 161142] DATA LOSS!!! Libreoffice calc comments
> vanished" on 12 Sept 2024, requesting the sanitized spreadsheet
> 
> File is a LibreOffice Calc spreadsheet

The file has one comment. I added three more and saved. After 2 hours of waiting, there was no loss of comments.

Arch Linux 64-bit
Version: 25.2.0.0.alpha0+ (X86_64) / LibreOffice Community
Build ID: fb39ae1bc7e4b1cbfc3108efca52ec310faf7363
CPU threads: 8; OS: Linux 6.10; UI render: default; VCL: kf6 (cairo+wayland)
Locale: fi-FI (fi_FI.UTF-8); UI: en-US
Calc: CL threaded
Built on 14 September 2024
Comment 9 John 2025-01-02 13:48:07 UTC
Hi, I just wanted to add that I've also encountered this issue. I've been unable to reproduce the error. On multiple occasions (over the course of days or weeks), I've noticed that comments I was certain I had added are missing. I've been able to recover them from backups, but the process is quite tedious and it's frustrating to not realize the data is lost until it's too late, at which point I may not even have backups to recover from. Manually, I haven't deleted comments from the sheet through the menu bar option and I've checked that I don't have a shortcut to do so, so I don't think that's the cause. I'm not sure how comments can be lost in the first place, but it's happened to me multiple times.

Best regards

Version: 7.3.2.2 (x64) / LibreOffice Community
Build ID: 49f2b1bff42cfccbd8f788c8dc32c1c309559be0
OS: Windows 10.0 Build 19045; UI render: Skia/Raster; VCL: win
Calc: CL
Comment 10 ralf.fehlau 2025-01-06 10:35:51 UTC
I cannot reproduce it, but it occurs, when opening comment for edit, and  resizing the comment box oder clicking middle or right mouse button within the comments. Also try to change font or background / foreground color. Maybe a combination of these actions result in comment loss (NOT only the current comment, several other comments will be lost), when saving the document. After opening the document again, the comments have vanished.

The bug is present in version 7.6.x, too.
Comment 11 andreas.kirschner 2025-05-20 20:51:34 UTC
For me, this problem happens when working with fods files. ods files are ok.
Comment 12 BogdanB 2025-05-21 04:42:42 UTC
I played with a .fods file. Edit, show, resize the comments. Close the file, reopen, and one of the comment is gone.

Version: 25.2.3.1 (X86_64) / LibreOffice Community
Build ID: d8d1af5f77df955194e52baabe19324532ac8e8b
CPU threads: 16; OS: Linux 6.11; UI render: default; VCL: gtk3
Locale: en-US (en_US.UTF-8); UI: en-US
Calc: threaded
Comment 13 Cip Dani 2025-06-23 13:58:16 UTC
Additional technical context based on extended testing:

- I experienced a loss of nearly all cell comments in a `.ods` spreadsheet after editing it over several days.
- The file contained a football ranking table with about 40 rows initially, each row having one comment.
- Over 3–4 days, I incrementally added rows (up to 49) and saved the file regularly — comments were always saved correctly.

Bug event:
- Today, while editing a specific comment, a known glitch occurred: the comment appeared visually duplicated (as in previous bugs).
- Instead of deleting it (which in the past caused *all* comments to be deleted), I chose `Save As...` immediately, while all comments were still visible.
- I then closed the file (no crash, no freeze).
- Upon reopening the file: most of the comments had disappeared entirely (and indeed are missing from `content.xml`).

Conclusion:
This is not only a rendering bug but also a serialization issue. It seems the comment subsystem becomes internally inconsistent after the glitch, causing LibreOffice to exclude all existing comments from being saved.

LibreOffice 25.2.3.2 on Ubuntu 24.04 — GTK3 VCL — threaded Calc enabled.