Showing and Hiding text question

programming flash
1

I have a page where the user would click on a square and some text would show up. There are say 8 squares, and each square triggers its own text block. When the scene loads the text block section is blank until you pick a square.

I assume I would set up a button for each square, and when it is clicked show the matching text block. But I’m not sure quite how to go about this. Would I have all 8 text blocks on their own layers, set to alpha of 0? Then when the square is picked change the alpha to 100? Or is there a better way?

Edit: I figured it out to a point. I made the text box into a symbol and made the button, and set up this ActionScript:

 
blogTextBox_btn.onRelease = function () {
     blogTextBox._alpha = 100; // set chosen text box to visible
         localRegionalTextBox._alpha = 0; // hide other text boxes
}

This does work to show/hide the text boxes I’ve set. However, I’d really like them to fade in, not just “pop” in. Instead of setting the _alpha to 100, how can I fade it from 0-100?

Also, it seems like I have to set my text box symbols as movie clips to be able to set an instance name…is that right? You can’t give a graphic symbol an instance name?

Thanks