Hidden in the advanced formatting options for numbers are several ways of displaying zero values on your reports.  To find these options, right click on a numeric field and select “Format Field”. Then click on the “Number” tab and finally click on the “Customize” button at the bottom of that screen.

One option is to suppress the zeros completely so they show up as blanks.  To do this there is a checkmark in the upper left.

Another option is to display something specific instead of zeros and this is found in the lower right of the same screen.  You will see a drop-down under the heading “Show zero values as”.  Here you can keep the default behavior or use another value, like a dash or a zero.  I wondered what the difference was between Default and the zero and it took some testing to figure it out. The default might show decimals, like 0.00 or 0.0000 but if you set the default to zero the decimals won’t show.

But the real secret of this last setting is that it is one of the only drop-down lists in CR where you can type your own value.  In other words you can type whatever you want to show as the zero value, like “n/a”, or “Pending”.  This is similar to using a “Display String” (on the common tab) but without the need to write a formula.