Exporting to animated gif ?

I am currently using the free version and most things are quite impressive.

I am wondering how we go about exporting these effects to animated gif's. It seems that when I publish, the swf file looks great. But when I export movie to animated gif or mov, the effects dont show. Is there something that needs to be done to allow an animated gif ?

Here is what you have to do if you want to export as .mov:

Open your source file, go to File->Export->Export Movie and save it as mov. It will open a popup with some options to choose:
-first you have to check the "Ignore stage color..." so that you won't have a background color.
-then check "After time elapsed" so that you will be able to set the duration of your movie depending on the animation duration.
-finally you have to set the duration of your movie.
The same goes for .gif, but I must add that it will lack in quality exporting as a .gif.

Thank you very much. I will give that a try