To help proofread a long document I've turned on the "Styles Guide" in the MS Word Styles Toolbox. It's a great help, but sometimes in addition to the styles numerical code there is a "+" displayed (as in "12+"). Sometimes there is simply a "+" sign with no numerical code. Can someone explain what that means? I can find no reference anywhere.



Thank you, in advance.

Can't immediately reproduce what you see – different platform, different version – but as far as I remember the + ought be alerting you to a local override: someone has, for example, selected a styled paragraph and applied an extra tweak such as making it italic or upping the size. Try selecting one of these paragraphs and pressing Ctrl/Command and spacebar: does this make the + disappear?

I've now discovered (thanks to Stefan Blom) that 2010 for Windows has something called the Styles inspector – which seems to be broken – and also something called the Reveal formatting pane. This second option is toggled by Shift + F1 (in Windows), and if you select the "Distinguish style source" checkbox … it gives you detailed information about the selected text and paragraph.

Hope you can find the same thing on the Mac!