Crystal Reports and parameters

After an unanswered post on CF-Talk, too many hours of digging around i've managed to find an MM tech note on how to pass a paramter to Crystal Reports XI. Though not one the most confident inspiring tech notes below is an even briefer description of how to do this:

<cfreport report="c:\\reports\\EmpDept.rpt">
{Employees.Department} IN [#Departments#]
</cfreport>

<cfreport report="c:\\reports\\CustbyState.rpt">
{Customer.State} = "AK"
</cfreport>

The following is correct syntax for using ODBC 'Date type' in Crystal Reports.

<cfreport report="report.rpt">
{table1.DateField} = {d '1997-07-01'}
</cfreport>

<cfreport report="report.rpt">
{table1.DateField} = Date(1997, 07, 01)
</cfreport>