Thanks for your reply and I guess that should work beautifully in a document where the styles have been properly applied but unfortunately ....

I have changed the Styles Pane option to show the bullet and number formatting options, but when I select a sample piece of bulleted text it is showing up as 'Normal' text albeit a modified version of it.
i.e. I select the text and in the style pane the style 'Normal' is highlighted. If I right click on this I get the option 'Update Normal to match selection'.
None of the 'bullet' type styles in the Styles list actually correspond to the superset of the text that I want to select. I can demonstrate this by right clicking on each 'bullet' style and seeing how many instances of that style exist in the document (very few).

Any other ideas???