Hi lockwelle
thanks for that. i have been away for a week so sorry for taking so long to reply to your post.
I Already had a good idea how the parameter fields worked, so was more interested in what the values the parameters were being compared to represented.
I have since found out that the values are passed throughto crystal from the software wea are using but nobody knows what -1, 0, 1, 2 actually represent. i have been able to establish that -1 represents all records from a given database column but as to what the others mean, who knows.
Most of the reports use this -1, 0, 1, 2, etc as input for parameters but when using the front end the user selects text values such as Southern, northern, etc. These are then passed to crystal and translated somehow into the numbers to be compared in IF statements.
I may try to contact the original developer to find out how everything works but if you have any ideas in the meantime i would love to hear them.