Each paragraph style can be seen alongside the text in Microsoft Word but it’s very much an afterthought that could be much improved.
The Style Area Pane appears only in Draft and Outline view on the left-side.
Turn on Style Area Pane
Dig into Word for the Style Area Pane. File | Options | Advanced | Display then add a measurement to ‘Style Area pane width in Draft and Outline views’.
Don’t worry about the exact width … just make sure it’s more than zero. 1″ or 3cm is enough to start with.
Change Style Area Width
The exact width setting doesn’t matter because once the Style Area Pane is visible, it’s adjustable by dragging a cursor. It can be resized left/right just like other Word panes such as Navigation and Formatting.
Style area pane could be better
The Style Area Pane can be a useful diagnostic tool but Microsoft hasn’t done a good job implementing it
It’s only visible in Draft and Outline view, arguably the two views least applicable to seeing style information. Print Layout view would benefit most from the Style Area pane
It’s a global setting (ie for all documents) when it’s really something users want to quickly turn on/off for specific documents and reasons.
Only paragraph styles are shown, not character styles applied within the paragraph. In the first example, above, a Heading style is used in the Body Text but that doesn’t show up in the Style Area Pane.
