Sorry if this sounds obvious but I've been racking my brain trying to figure
this out for a while! I'm creating a flash presentation in CS3. I have created
each section of the presentation as seperate movie clip symbols - How do I get
my seperate movie clip symbols to play in the correct order? I've tried adding
the movie clips to different layers of the main timeline and also on different
frames on 1 layer but this doesn't seem to work. Any help would be greatly
appreciated. (I need the movie clip symbols to finish playing there sequence
before it moves on to the next movie clip symbol)

I would make an empty movie clip and load your first movie into that clip. At
the end of the timeline for that movie clip, add a key frame with some
actionscript that loads the next movie clip into the same movie clip and repeat
the same for the other clips.

Actionscript to create empty mc and attach movie from library with name
chapter1:

_root.createEmptyMovieClip("holderMc", 999);
holderMc.attachMovie("chapter1", ch1, 1001);

Actionscript to put in movie clip presentation at end of timeline:

_root.holderMc.attachMovie("chapter2", ch2, 1001);

Of course your MC instance names may vary, but you can you something similar
to this code...

There are many ways you can go about doing this, but I'm asuming that you have
you movie clips loading from your library, not as external SWFs, correct? Hope
this helps...

Thanks DLMAES, i'll give that a go, I will have to load external swf files into the same presentation aswell, whats the best way to do that?

Thanks

D.

You're welcome, your actionscript to load and external swf should look something like this:

holderMc.loadMovie("myfile.swf", 1001);

If it is linear playing, you can also create scenes and put each clip on its
scene's main timeline. By default flash plays scenes following numbers scene1,
then scene2, then....scene X.

Your first solution would work if on main timeline you extend frames for the
duration of each clip. Say clip1's lenght is 210 frame, clip2 is 300 frames,
and clipX is X frames. On root create three blank keyframes: one at frame1, the
second on frame 211, the third at frame 512 (label the keyframes accordingly)
then simply put each clip on the keyframe were it should appear.

Scenes are better than having one long main timeline though.

That is true evrardBlom... thanks for your insight!