Hiding zeroes in Office 2002

Hi
My mate uses Excel 2002. I've talked him through setting up a few formulae,
one of which is like this:
=IF(A2="",0,VLOOKUP(A2,F:H,2,FALSE))
When A2 is empty, this returns a zero - which, he says, cannot be hidden
with conditional formatting or Tools|Options|View / Zero Values. He has
another formula to multiply this value by a quantity, so he can't return a
"" - it needs to be a number.
I use Office 2000 - and don't have this problem!! Both of the above hide my
zeroes. If anyone can shed any light on this I'd appreciate it!
Cheers.

--
Andy.