Apple Numbers pivot table does not count blank cells

I have a Numbers spreadsheet and one of the columns is text. Some of the rows in that column are empty. I create a pivot table and want to get a count of all the occurrence of text values in that column. So for example, I have "Required", "In Progress", "Not Required" plus as mentioned, some of the cells are empty. In the resultant pivot table I get the correct count of the number of occurrences of the above values. A row is generated for the empty cells called "(blank)" but the count is 0 which is wrong because I have many blank cells. I tried changing the source table column cell data format from "Automatic" to "Text" but the results are the same. I also have tried putting a space in the blank cells and the pivot table creates new a row where the row name is empty (likely there is a single space in it) and correctly counts the number of rows I've put a space in. The "(blank)" row is still there and the count is still 0.

How can I count those empty cells in the pivot table? I'd like this to be part of the pivot table functionality. I know I can set up separate formulas to do that but that defeats the purpose of the simplicity of a pivot table. I'm thinking that this is either a bug with pivot tables or an option that is not available or I haven't found.

Thanks in advance!