Time duration for titles, subtitles

Howdy Folks.
In Premiere Elements 4 I need to occassionally put a (sub)title on a clip. I have figured out how to do that, however, my problem is that when I use this title as a subtitle in the lower part of the frame to explain who is speaking, such as Police Chief Joe Dokes, I do not know how long the default duration of the title is and the only way I can figure out how to shorten the duration is by trimming manually with the in and out points.

In CyberLink Power Director 6, I get a simple popup window that I can set the duration in seconds, such as 4 or 5, but in Premiere it appears I have to do the manual trim which I have not been very good at.
My newspaper group uses Premiere for our Web video stories and I love the program for many reasons, but this simple task seems to be tedious and very frustrating to accomplish.
I'm sure I am doing something incorrectly or overlooking something.
Any and all suggestions will be appreciated.

I don't know if Elements is like Pro, but in Pro the default duration is 5 sec. You can change this by going to Edit > Preferences (it's actually under "still images") and set it to whatever you want. If you don't want to change the default you can simply go to the timeline and stretch or shrink the title as needed after you've laid in onto the track as a clip.

Maybe Elements is similar. Have you checked the online help?

Thanks.
I'll give that a shot. I figured a program as good as Premiere would allow me to do what I wanted to do.