I think that using a space character is a mistake. That will ruin formulas that
look like:

=if(a1="","it's blank","it's not blank")

I use a formula like this:
=if(a1="","",a1)
if I don't want to see those 0's.

Using conditional formatting for this seems overkill to me.

Charles, Leeuwenburg wrote:

This quirk has driven me crazy through 5 versions of Excel. I often have a need for cells to return or repeat text strings based on the contents of cells contained in different worksheets or workbooks. It doesn't happen all the time (doesn't seem to be caused by various formatting of the cell - setting it as text or a number) but often when the cell recieving the data returns a "0" when the cell sending the data is empty. I've gotten around this by inserting a "space bar" key stroke in the cell sending the data. The esiest way to fix this problem (assuming that you're working with string text data and not numbers is to go into conditional formatting and set the cells to have a white font and not be seen or printed when the value in the cell is = 0. Hope this helps. An excellent link to explanation of conditional formatting:

http://www.contextures.com/xlCondFormat02.html

Hope this helps!
CL

EggHeadCafe - .NET Developer Portal of Choice
http://www.eggheadcafe.com/default.aspx?ref=ng

--

Dave Peterson