Timeline Best Practices?

I am fairly new to flash and I have been trying to make a product demo. Basically I want some text to fade in and then some pictures to show up one by one and then disappear and then some new text fades in etc. This is to talk about a product and show various parts of it as the text on the screen is discussing those parts of the product.
My question is what the preferred way of doing this is. Here are the options I can think of.
Approach 1) Put all animation in the main timeline. All text tweens take place on frames in the main timeline.
Approach 2) Put the text fade-in tweens in a movie clip and put that on the main timeline.
I have tried both these approaches but neither one has been working for me for the following reason.
Approach 1) Makes timeline very long and unwieldy. If one thing changes, it shifts everything over and messes up my whole timeline. Hard to manage.
Approach 2) If I have a stop(); on the main timeline, my animation stops in mid fade. In cases where I don't have a stop, I can't figure out how to do a series of objects fading in one after another. Is there a way to check if a movieclip has finished and only go to the next frame if it has finished? How do I get a series of clips to play one after another when I am running them as seperate movieclips off the main timeline.
Thanks in advance for your help. This newbie has already spent hours working on this and greatly appreciates your help.

So what is the best way to create a demo of the sort that I am talking about?With movieclips instead of putting everything in the main timeline?
It sounds like I need it like this:
Frame 1 place movieclip1 (at end of movieclip send to frame 3 in main timeline)
Frame 2 stop(); (because I want it finish playing the movie clip before it reaches the next frame)
Frame 3 remove movieclip1 and place movieclip2 which will start tweening in
Frame 4 stop();
etc...
Assuming I used this approach, how do I tell the movieclip to advance to the frame 3 in the main timeline when it finishes?
Also, I have used actionscript before but most of the flash books I have read talk about using tweening in the timeline so I was trying that. How would I do it via actionscript? Is there a way to find out if a tween is done to know whether to start the next tween? Something like
if (tween1.done == true) then {
//run tween 2

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    PowerPoint presentations seldom look good on TV. The people that create them usually don't take TV (and its limitations) into consideration when creating the slides. If you have one of the few presentations that looks OK on TV and you did mention that they looked better as a QuickTime movie, you can always import the movie file into your FCP project and then create still frames from the movie (shift n) then set whatever duration you want.
    -DH

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