Does anyone know of anything that explains shapes, their properties and the transform rules?

I’m too confused to be able to correctly state all the transforms

I created a text shape and added contents with bullets then decided I’d like a boarder so changed it to a box and the bullets all evaporated and the text became centred and there was no box drawn!  - not what I wanted so

I think I changed it back and the bullets were truly gone but the centering remained - bizarre that some attributes clear and other stick - and then I realised that it was a box but with a colourless boarder so I set a coloured boarder and then had to manually left align and turn bullets back on and at some point the font-size stopped being something rational because as a text label font size isn’t constrained but as a ‘named’ shape it is constrained - but since there is some ‘what you did last’ attributes that stick I could now draw a cloud with 7000pt font size - but I can’t set its boarder width to be ‘in keeping’ with its total size

I also could not get ctrl-z to trace a predicted path back to where i started