Flash Outline View

I know many of the Flash Builder(formerly Flex Builder) users will say"Wait!! there is no Outline view in Flash. Where did you come up with this stuff?". My answer would be, ohhh! i meant to say Movie Explorer panel.
Flash CS4 is a product rich of features, but many users only know about a small subset of its capabilities. Movie Explorer is one of those features that I am going to talk about in this post.

To open the Movie Explorer panel you can just go

Window > Movie Explorer or "Alt + F3."




Let's go over the Movie Explorer UI and explain how it works:

1. Launch Flash CS4.
2. First thing you want to do is to open Movie Explorer (Window > Movie Explorer) and dock it anywhere in the UI where you can see it at all time. I usually dock it on top of the action panel as follows :



Movie explorer has 6 buttons that filters different items in your Flash Movie as follows :


To show text items.

To show symbols (Movieclips,Buttons,Graphic).

To show actionscript code on the main timeline and inside symbols.

To show (video, sounds, and bitmaps).

To show layers and the content of each layer categorized by frames.

And also you can customize the settings of your Movie Explorer panel by clicking on

Which should present you with













Let's assume that you have a Fla file that has the following

1. Instance of a movieclip called "MyMovie".
2. Layer 2 that called "actionscript" and has trace statement on frame 1

Please make sure to press the Actionscript, Movieclip, and Layers buttons in the Movie Explorer and you should see :





Check out the below link to see more information about Movie Explorer
Adobe Flash Movie Explorer

You can save your current workspace by

"Window > Workspace > New Workspace" and just give it a name.




Enjoy it!
Tareq