Thanks, Andrei.

I worked out that I could re-orient to match your tutorial however this was just an example of the problems I've run into.

Another example is that I've managed the pivot procedure once but I just can't get it to work again and I think it is some simple setting that, for a complete beginner, is baffling while for an expert like yourself seems very obvious and does not require explanation.

Don't worry, I'll eventually get there.

As for z being the up configuration, I was totally amazed to see the this is not the case for polygonal modellers. It is hard to believe. At school, doing 2D graphs, did you not use x for horizontal and y for the vertical axis???? Vertical as going up the plane of the paper, not perpendicular to the paper.