Maybe the commands I'm after are before my eyes and I'm just not seeing them... Programs like Microsoft Word have "copy and paste text formatting" commands. The commands store character formatting and you can later paste the formatting to other text. With some editors, if a paragraph marker was part of the original selection, you can even paste the copied paragraph formatting—not just character formatting.
Something like that could be very useful in Publisher. But are there such commands for use within text frames and I've just missed them? I see a keyboard shortcut for "paste style" but it seems to apply only to objects, not text formatting.