The same happens to me. I turned on OpenGL and the active cell gets marked but the UI breaks really bad that I have to disable it again.
Clean profile didn’t help either. It’s weird that OpenGL makes a difference on my system (even if it becomes unusable). [Edit] The OP confirms that clean profile doesn’t help form him either.
I had the same problem too and it turned out that I had a driver issue on my system. I was using modesetting+vesa+fbdev but my X.org intel driver was missing. Reinstalling the xserver-xorg-video-intel driver helped. You can find further information in a bug I raised against LibreOffice, where other testers couldn’t reproduce the problem:
Thanks alvarezp!
This was actually the problem! Or should I say the solution to the problem!
Regards,
Xserty
Hi, thank you to all that contributed.
I can confirm that inmy particular case, fiddling with OpenGL options fixed the active cell border issue, but rendered the whole Calc unusable and unstable.
I’ve found that the solution provided by alvarezp resolved the problem completely.
Thanks again alvarezp! 
Regards,
Xserty
Unfortunately i’ve got the same error and
sudo apt-get install --reinstall xserver-xorg-video-intel
and rebooting did not help 
Activating OpenGL Rendering brings back the Active-Cell-Border but destroys many other Elements. Any Ideas?
I have the same problem on Ubuntu 16.10 for Calc 5.2.5.1 .
This bus appear in libreoffice 5.1.2, 5.1.6~rc2, 5.3.3~rc2
Xubuntu 16.04.2
aptitude reinstall xserver-xorg-video-intel-hwe-16.04
did not help
This is not an answer. It’s more of a Me Too!
Dual Core intel 2ghz running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. I followed the advice to use the intel graphics update tool. This did not resolve the issue. Running Libre Office 5.1.6.2
This one silly issue is making it exceedingly difficult to complete a migration off of windows.
Thanks for any advice.
2017-07-28: I am happy to see that the marking bug of LibreOfficeWriter and LibreOffice Calc has vanished today after my last system update which involved switching
- from Linux kernel 4.8.0-58-generic
x86_64 - to Linux kernel 4.10.0-28-generic
x86_64
plus a bundle of other upgrades.
Try using LibreOffice version 6.2.8, but NOT 6.3.1 or 6.3.2! See my bug report here: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=128406
Here is a workaround.
Set all the cell borders to light grey for the default cell style.
The active cell will have black borders and can be seen clearly (even on high resolution monitors)
THANK YOU!!! I’m on a Mac and tried everything. This works fine and having lighter cell borders is no problem.
I recently switched from an old iMac to a new MacBook and now have the same problem.
I opened LibreOffice preferences and tried to locate Cell Borders but couldn’t find it anywhere.Can any one advise?
Thank you for a very helpful reply. I have clicked on Manage Styles but cannot see a Borders tab. Screenshot attached. Unfortunately I seem to be making things worse as my cursor has just changed to an image of paint being poured out of a tin. Can’t work out how that happened, darn it!
So far so good.
Next, you need to click on “default” (on windows it is right click) – it is highlighted grey… This should open a dialog box that includes the border tab
Ah yes. I had managed to find that box via a different route, but it didn’t have any effect. This time it did. And the paint can cursor has gone away too.
Many thanks!
Glad it worked out. Note that that default style modifier box does not work in LibreOffice Writer (only works in calc)
Thanks. Writer also has a problem with an almost invisible text cursor, but I’ve managed to find a workaround for that.
Edward