Could you please give me a little bit more information about the different steps to reproduce it, because I am not sure how to reproduce it.
I know with VIEW -> SIDEBAR you can select whether the sidebar is shown or not and if the full sidebar is open you can close it with clicking on X so that you can only see the icons.  But how can you hide the sidebar and where can I find the show button?  Thank you very much in advance.

(tested with LO 4.3.3.2, Win 8)

To the right of the scrollbar, there is a small button, which can be seen in attachment 105798 [details]. It is used to hide and unhide the sidebar without having the enable/disable it from the view menu.

As this happens in a random way, in order to reproduce it, you would have to be regularly hiding and unhiding the sidebar during your regular usage of LibO.

Steps:
1) Open Writer with sidebar in its enabled but hidden/closed state
2) Click the small show button to expand sidebar
3) Move mouse to toolbar or to document
4) Sidebar hides itself

Thank you very much for your fast reply and support.

I tried it a few times, but I could unfortunately not reproduce it.  But you wrote it happens randomly and not always?  I will take care if I can maybe see it in the next days.

(tested with LO 4.3.3.2, Win 8.1)

Hi Jay, Andy,

There's two behaviours for this button. 
Once the sidebar enabled but closed (you see a narrrow band with a central button on the right of the scrollbar), if you click exactly on the button, you open the sidebar and it keeps opened constantly. If you now click out of this button but into the narrow band to open the sidebar, this time when you click into your document to work, the sidebar disappears.
Is it the behaviour you observed?

Regards,

Jacques

Jacques, thanks for your feedback.

If I click on the dots/button in the middle the sidebar stays open.
But if I click on the narrow band above or below of the button and then move the mouse outside the sidebar then the sidebar closes after a few moments.
But then this is probably no bug?

@Jay: Was this also the behaviour you had?

(tested with LO 4.3.3.2, Win 8.1)

Hi Jacques,

Till the moment you just mentioned it now, i didnt know that it was possible to click anything but the central button to open the sidebar. Maybe it could be that i was trying to click the central button and am missing it by a few pixels and so it was opening in that manner. So is there a reason why this behaviour of clicking outside of the central button is made to work in this fashion?

Hi Jay,

I learned it like you, about the media window in Impress. Only a few pixels out of the button and you experiment it. 
All anchored windows have this behaviour. So Gallery and database windows. This is useful to apply a style for example and find again the whole window to work.
Perhaps this is not very well documented...

Jacques

(In reply to Jay Philips from comment #6)
> Hi Jacques,
> 
> Till the moment you just mentioned it now, i didnt know that it was possible
> to click anything but the central button to open the sidebar. 

me too.

>  Maybe it could be that i was trying to click the central button and am missing it by a few
> pixels and so it was opening in that manner. So is there a reason why this
> behaviour of clicking outside of the central button is made to work in this
> fashion?

I think that is a bug... there's a lot of time where I want to move the scrollbar and if I'm not very accurate with the mouse I accidentally hit the sidebar causing it to pop out.

IMHO the sidebar should be opened only by clicking on the small dots sensible area. being sensible to clicks above and below it and with a different behaviour can cause confusion for user in different scenarios...

either for those who truly wanted to expand the sidebar (but clicked a few pixels higher or lower) and see it auto-hide when going back to the document (Jay's case) or those (like me) who just wanted to click the scrollbar (but clicked a few pixels right) and see unwanted appearance of the sidebar.

let's consider opening a clean new report about the real issue which is that sidebar can be expanded even clicking outside it's pop-up button

(In reply to tommy27 from comment #8)
> or those (like me) who just wanted to click the scrollbar (but
> clicked a few pixels right) and see unwanted appearance of the sidebar.

Yes this happens to me constantly as my reflects always move to the farthest point to the right to click the scrollbar. :D

let's set the status to NEW but let's consider opening a new clean report with just the exact information about the issue which is due to the presence of clickable areas above and below the expand button

The show/hide button is longer since 5.0.

Still repro, if I click the collapsed Sidebar's edge. Then, clicking in the document closes the sidebar.

Arch Linux 64-bit
Version: 7.1.0.0.alpha1+
Build ID: c54e1c22f30c23d00e2fe7521217569fcec59cc4
CPU threads: 8; OS: Linux 5.9; UI render: default; VCL: kf5
Locale: fi-FI (fi_FI.UTF-8); UI: en-US
Calc: threaded
Built on 13 November 2020

Repro with 24.2.5.2

Version: 24.2.5.2 (X86_64) / LibreOffice Community
Build ID: bffef4ea93e59bebbeaf7f431bb02b1a39ee8a59
CPU threads: 8; OS: Windows 10.0 Build 22631; UI render: Skia/Raster; VCL: win
Locale: en-US (pl_PL); UI: en-US
Calc: threaded


It looks like a documented feature — Help calls it AutoHide [1].

"Click the button on the edge of the docked window to show or hide the docked window. The AutoHide function allows you to temporarily show a hidden window by clicking on its edge. When you click in the document, the docked window hides again."


-------------

[1] Help for Calc, topic "Showing, Docking and Hiding Windows"
https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-US/text/shared/guide/autohide.html