Here's One For All You Brainiacs Out There

I have a movie that a set of buttons on the side
and another set of buttons on the bottom.

The side buttons are always why?, how? and with what?
The bottom buttons load in different topics, i.e. hydration, cleaning, etc.

Bot are seperate MC's importing the relevent .swf's
that hold the info, i.e when you click 'cleaning' and 'how'
you get different info to 'hydration' and 'how'.

My question is;

Is there a way to send a variable or such to change the actions of the'why', 'how', buttons so that it tells them that hydration or cleaning has been chosen and in turn load in the relevent .swf or attached MC.

I've tried for ages to this but I can't figure it out, so if
you can tell me how to do it would be a great help.

Thanks,

Lenny.