Photoshop Question

Hey , I’m pretty new to photoshop and i’m still trying to make a transistion from corel photpaint to photoshop…

I came across this tutorial

http://www.phong.com/tutorials/flash/transparent/

But where it says select the alpha 1 channel… I don’t have that channel available in PS7 (he used PS 5.5) the tutorial says that you should only have 1 layer and 1 channel where as I have 1 layer and the r,g,b channels :-/