Fluid boxes and clickable buttons

I have been trying to figure out this responsive project with the fluid boxes. The last project I did was not responsive so the fluid boxes have been new to me. The one thing I can’t figure out of how to put in Vertical buttons but have the content be horizontal.

Part of the problem seems to be fluid boxes being grayed out when I try to add more with the template they gave me. Here is what I see when trying to add more fluid boxes to the middle box.

I would like to add buttons like this one for the text to appear like from a previous project:

Anyways, I experimented with having the template as a master slide and It seems to work better:

Even with that, I still can't seem to make it work because I need the shapes horzontal to the text but vertical to each other. Do I need a third fluid box for the smart shape buttons???