Thanks, Alfred and Rich. I have gotten comfortable with most of the features I need in elements until I need to figure out something new, then you know how bad the proprietary help literature is on these programs.....and Rich, I found out how to do something in Microsoft Word on Youtube after searching around for an hour in the help literature.
In fact, I posted a blog post about how useless a lot of help literature is. Alfred - I'll check out that book. I need to learn more about working in layers. I've figured out the basics, but I think there's a whole world of other stuff in there I could make use of.