Empty cells being counted as 12/30/1899 for date calculations - I want it to be 0

Has anyone found a good workaround for this?

I have a table in which there are some fields with a formula that returns either a date or "" depending on several conditions.

However, I also have some formulas to calculate DAYS() between dates... and it's taking the formulas that return "" as 12/30/1899 for calculations.

Is there a way to prevent this? Should I be asking formulas to return something different than ""?

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SOLUTION, thanks to u/MattyPKing:

change the formula so that if a certain cell is empty it doesn't show anything...

instead of =DAYS(C2,D2)

=IF(D2="",,DAYS(C2,D2))

that is, "if D2 is empty, don't do anything"

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