Format Paintbrush?

I never have been able to get the format brush in Word to do what people say it does. My understanding is that is copies the format/style of an area & then pastes it to another. In Pages there is the ability to copy & paste styles, either in the Format menu, keyboard commands or using the Toolbar icons. You also can apply any style in the styles drawer.

It probably doesn't work for me because I rarely have to use it & don't care to deal with something that is so counter-intuitive. It's always been easier for me to use AppleWorks &, now, Pages to change formatting. Since I'm usually doing it for my own benefit, I'm going to save the file in the program of my choice (& that is definitely not Word!).

I agree that Format Painter is a great tool, but I think Pages' and Numbers' Format > Copy Style is as good. The functionality is almost identical as far as I can tell. Shortcuts: ⌥⌘C and ⌥⌘V. In Pages you also have ⌥⌘⇧C for copy character style.

I miss the Paintbrush icon as seen in MS Word. Word's paintbrush is absolutely simple to use; although it may take 30 seconds to read the Help page to understand how to operate it. Pages '08 new icon additions seem to have been motivated by some users' demands for a similar Copy Paragraph Style icon. An icon for Copy/Paste Character Styles would be equally useful.

At the same time, the reason I chose a Mac back in 1985 was because I didn't want to use a bunch of complicated keystrokes just to accomplish what could be done with a simple click of the mouse. Now the GUI in Pages seems to be going in the direction of more keystrokes. Has someone from MS been hiding in deep cover on the Pages development team, only to surface now, early in the 21st century?