Hi Stan,
It's not really surprising that after 20 years of Photoshop Elements that you're going to come across some dead links, or out-of-date material when you perform a general search like you have just done covering the whole of the Adobe Support website.
If you have a look at the URL from your example above, you'll see that it includes the words "archive" and "PSE12" which should be a dead giveaway that the material on this particular page is probably out-of-date, or maybe doesn't even exist anymore.
There are plenty of other options available to you to help you work with Photoshop Elements, way more than just what a printed manual offers.
Let's take your "straighten image" scenario:
1. As Greg points out above, the first thing you'll see when you open up Elements is the Welcome Screen. At the top of the window is a search field labelled "What would you like to today?". Starting to type in 'straighten' and the auto-suggest comes up with "Straighten an image" - perfect! The first result takes us to the exact point in the Elements User Guide which covers straightening an image.
2. In the Elements Editor in Quick Edit Mode, the toolbox contains tooltips which pop-up when you hover your mouse over their icon. You could explore there and discover a "Straighten Tool". Click on that tool, and a short description how it works appears in the Tool Options panel. There's a ? icon in the Tools Options panel too; clicking on that takes us to the same page in the User Guide mentioned above.
3. Going into the Guided Edit Mode, let's have a look under the Basics section, as straightening an image would be a pretty common task. Yes, there's a Rotate and Straighten Guided Edit with a little animation to show you how it can work, activated by moving your mouse horizontally over the thumbnail. Click that thumbnail, and in the panel on the right there's a guided step-by-step description of how to straighten an image. Again, there's a ? icon in that panel too, which when you click on it opens up the Rotate and Straighten Guided Edit page in the User Guide, just in case you need even more information.
4. There's this forum which is perfect for asking even the most simplest questions. It's user-to-user, so most of the people on here are not Adobe employees, just Photoshop Elements users who enjoy helping out other Photoshop Elements users 🙂
5. And of course, there's the User Guides (there are three guides for the Elements family) which you can either view online (the most up-to-date) or download as PDFs (which are a little out-of-date but not much!). You can access the User Guides at any time by Here are the direct links to the User Guides, which I suggest bookmarking, and the PDFs:
Elements Organizer User Guide
Photoshop Elements User Guide
Premiere Elements User Guide
Elements Organizer User Guide (PDF)
Photoshop Elements User Guide (PDF)
Premiere Elements User Guide (PDF)
The User Guides are really well-written and contain lots of visual examples. Finding good technical writers is not cheap, nevermind about the cost of printing and distributing manuals. Keeping Photoshop Elements at the same price point for 20 years ($99) means there's inevitably going to be some cost-saving measures somewhere, and hopefully you'll find the User Guides (and all the other ways of getting help) make up for the lack of a printed manual 🙂
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