Pivot table format changes if value of source data is null

I am about ready to give up on this...but maybe someone out there has a
suggestion.

I have set up standard pivot table reports in 4 different workbooks that are
drawing on the same worksheets, but within their respective workbooks.
Within some of these workbooks, there is no value (or zero) for the fields
that are the source data for the pivot tables. When this is the case, the
pivot table, instead of displaying a - (for a null value as I indicated in
the table options) drops the row value heading all together and completely
screws up the standardization I was trying to achieve across all workbooks.


For example, if I had data for:

USA
Canada
Japan

If the value for the profits for Japan were 0, the pivot table would only show

USA
Canada

I already tried to preserve the formatting and to show rows for null values
options but nothing works!

This pretty much renders pivot tables useless if they are unable to display
null values with changing their format!

Please help!

Has anyone solved this problem?