Why are zero values being displayed?

Here is the situation:

A1 is empty.
B1 is set to “=A1”.
B1 then displays “0”.

I find this puzzling and new behavior. Previous behavior seemed to be that B1 would display as empty until a value was present in A1.

I am not sure if I accidentally tweaked a setting. I tried removing number formatting for the fields which did not help. Even after formatting B1 to text category, it still displays a “0” value!

An awkward workaround is setting B1 to “=if(A1<>”",A1,"") but this seems overly cumbersome.

What am I missing here?

I find this … new behavior. Previous behavior seemed to be that B1 would display as empty until a value was present in A1.

To hide zero values, you can use menu item Tools -> Options and deselect “Zero values” under LibreOffice Calc -> View But in this case every calculation, that evaluates to zero, will result in visually empty cell. Take a look at this and this

@orrin: if you close a question as duplicate then please link the duplicated question in a comment. Thanks.