4 Chapter 4, with annotations.docx (130.8 KB)
Please help me to get my document back. It should be 49 pages long, it’s only showing 17. I’m not very computer literate, so couldn’t follow the fixes I read in similar posts to this.
Thanks, Niamh
thank you so much. What should I do now to prevent this happening on further documents?
Unfortunately, I don’t know. This is a bug, but to prevent it from happening (i.e., to fix it), reproducible steps to make it happen are required. If you know how to make it happen, e.g. “open this fixed document; go to point X; type this; press that button; …; save and reload → error” - then please file a bug report, attach the original working document, and describe these exact steps that lead to the error. Then we would be able to repro, suggest a workaround, and - most important - will fix it.
But for now, the only thing that I know is that some ~recent change in the change tracking made DOCX unreliable. A huge spike of problems.
Well: avoid DOCX as your main format (this is a usual and good practice); in the meanwhile, avoid change tracking there… no idea how would that satisfy your case 
Save native, i.e. .odt.
If some external recipient requires DOCX from you, work native and export DOCX only to send. In an iterative workflow, when your external collaborator sends you back remarks and amendments, incorporate them into you .odt document. Don’t let your document be polluted by any DOCX formatting information. Understanding M$ formats is incomplete (as it is a proprietary undisclosed format). Approximations are made during translation to and from this format, resulting in a progressive damage to the document.
I suspect now that this was tdf#147892, fixed in 7.5.2 (released today), and 7.4.7 (to be released). Hope that the spike comes to its end now.