Hiyah Slinger! Welcome aboard.

First off . .Vegas doesn't have a storyboard . .in the traditional sense. So you don't get an option to place clips and butt things in a rigid way - yeah? Now, for most of us - I'd say 98% of us users here - we regard this as a bonus. And no you don't need to use the trimmer to get your pieces the right length. You can do all this on the Timeline. If you carefully, and it takes a bit of practice, place your cursor over the end of a clip you will see the cursor change to a double ended arrow type thing. Hold down left mouse button and reduce the size of the clip by moving the mouse left. And yes, moving right makes the clip longer.

There are many, many more good things you are going to experience with this free and easy way to editing . . but I'll leave others to jump in. Just remember, Vegas doesn't have a Story board - as such - yeah?

Have you downloaded the Manual? It's very useful and is free too!

Have fun - Grazie

If you want a transition between two clips simply overlap the clips by dragging part of one event over the other. That's it. Transition done. I never saw an easier way to apply transitions.
If you wanna change the transition type just drag and drop another transition on the overlapping part between the two clips.

Marco

Slinger,
You'll find that all of us have different ways of doing many things in Vegas. I use the trimmer - many people don't. You should play around with tracks and events a little. See how the upper track covers everything underneath, see how you can shorten events like Grazie said. But if you make it longer past the length of the actual file it will start looping. Go on, take chances and try to unlearn what you knew from before. Vegas does a lot of things differently and mostly better that the others (or so I'm told - I have not personally used anything else). You learn by playing. Amazing discoveries are waiting for you.

Anyway - what part of Norway are you from? I'm from Stavanger.
Tor

The key to learning Veags is to experiment-play around. With so powerfull software it is kind of hard to explain everything. I would start with reading manual. When goes to reansition-I just overlap two clips and drop transitions betwine them. The lenght of transition is depend of how much you overlap.
Just play around and discover the Vegas. I use Vegas for a year and still learning new way of doing something.
Have a fun

I think the one thing tha your missing is ripple. Normally when yoy place a clip on the timeline on track that already has one there the new one just sits on top of it if its shorter. If you turn on ripple edit it'll push the other clip to the right to make enough room for the new clip. You do have to either split the existing clip or drop the new one in between two clips

Hope I got that right becuase I don't normally work that way!

BTW remember two important things:

Nothing is destructive.
You have unlimited undo.