Help Learning Flash

Question

I have no experience in Flash nor anything that even closely
relates to or carries over in any way (Although I am not stupid...
:) ). I have learned how to do many things within Flash in the past
couple days, however I am having trouble learning to create buttons
to navigate around the flash document. Let me describe what I am
doing, then feel free to offer any feedback as I may be going about
the entire process wrong.
What I am doing is creating a tutorial for an encounter for a
game I play. This tutorial will contain about 5 different sections
each of which is a screens worth of data. I have created little
flash movies that run little animations (ok... yeah... like 1...
but like I said... I only started using Flash a few days ago...).
This method would work for this other project if I could create
buttons or links to different points on the time line. So currently
I have a flash document that starts as a Title Page with some
animated content then this basically morphs into an overview page
with more content and animation and this process continues to chain
from one section like this to another. What would be nice is to
have links on the overview page that allow the user to choose which
section to jump to if they want. Then to have control buttons to
advance to the next section, pause, and go back to the overview
page.
Now I also thought that maybe I could create different scenes
and just jump to these different scenes. I have been able to create
a series of scenes that would work for this purpose, however when
it comes to creating the buttons I am at ground zero...
Well... ok, not exactly ground Zero... I can make a button...
modify its different states... but I don't see how to tell it how
to do anything other than link to a web site... certainly no kind
of linking within the document. I have found tutorials on
controlling Video but those are off topic and useless to me...
The animated elements are some moving text, an animated Gif,
and things changing in size, color, alpha and so forth all done on
the time line with motion tweens, transformations and transitions.
I hope I have been descriptive enough and am not looking for
anyone to write me a walk through, a simple point in the right
direction to help I can find for myself would be excellent.
Thanks for your time

Answer 1

Alright... I am very proud of myself and have figured out how
to make these buttons and get them to work... now I just had to add
some complexity... let me just share how I am setting up my buttons
now and what added element I want and see what we can do...
First I place an image on the stage and convert it to a Movie
Clip then I create the following for Actionscript 3
overviewBTN.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, onClick);
function onClick(event:MouseEvent):void
gotoAndPlay("Overview1", "Overview");
This works fantastically... but I wanted to have a transition
from scene to scene that had some flow and was efficient... so I
added 10 frames to my starting point as a transition out of that to
a generic state that I can pickup and stage for whatever I want...
So what I am after now is the ability to play 10 frames in my
current scene then jump to and play the intended scene... here is
what I have tried...
overviewBTN.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, onClick);
function onClick(event:MouseEvent):void
gotoAndPlay("bgnfd", "Contents");
gotoAndStop("endfd", "Contents");
gotoAndPlay("Overview1", "Overview");
Now the odd thing is... each "goto" line works by itself
however when I put the last line in it skips the first two... I
have tried many combinations of this...
Thanks again for the help Cliff Ray as it was your help that
set me off on my journey and have made great progress.