I'm looking for a way to send and receive bitcoins to and from an address to myself. I'm using bitcoin qt but I don't see a want of selecting which address I want to send "from". Only when I click send coins can I actually change which address I want to send to.
Correct. With the user interface of Bitcoin-Qt you cannot control which bitcoins you send. The wallet takes care of that for you. If you want to select specific outputs to be spent as inputs you need a wallet that provides "coin control".
Note, if you send your entire balance from your wallet to a new address in your wallet, then the very next transaction that you send will come "from" that new address.
