Categorising posts: Writing

Anyone there?? With 50 thousand topics and nearly quarter of a million posts for this subsection of only one of the forums I can see no way to search for an answer to my problem. I can find no search strings that return any relevant postings. So help me if you would.

I have installed and got a WordPress blog up and running, but it doesn’t appear to be working properly. I have searched ever menu item and option in the dashboard. Some of the standard menu options shown in the help pages here (Docs) don’t exist in my default theme. The main problem is with the Writing page. There, to the left of the writing area, and below the image upload section, there are a number of boxes with phrases in them eg Discussion, Password-protect post etc etc. It looks like they should do something but they don’t. All I can do is move the boxes around the screen and rearrange them, which is a pretty pointless thing to do so I can’t imagine anyone coded it this way. The outcome is that there is no way I can find to, for instance, classify a post as belonging to a particular category (I have set up three categories apart from the default one). But all the other “boxes” seem to refer to functions of a post that I want to access. Why can’t I? What’s missing?

HELP please?