Empty fields not showing in my report

[Aptitude]

I have a report that has a cream coloured background. I want to put fields on this that have a white background and black border.

I have set the border and background colour in the fields properties and this works fine if there is text in the field.

Some of my fields have an empty string in them and when the report prints the white background and border does not get shown for these fields.

Is there some way to stop Crystal Reports from doing this?

I am using Crystal Reports for Visual Studio .NET