I've been fiddling with salesforce and a bit with the new lightning features. I am not very experienced with salesforce, but have decades of custom software development under my belt. There is a lot to like about salesforce. And, the out of the box 'controls' as I would call them using my old frame of reference as a developer, as shockingly limited. I have been using workflow rules to populate the Name field with meaningful data, but it's all incredibly clunky.
I know there are enhancements via kits like gridbuddy and skuid. But I would like to see what a very good salesforece dev can do with the out of control features. I want to know the basics before I start relying on third party packages. I realize that the lightning features will eventually push the platform more towards where I want it to be, but all of that seems a ways off in terms of maturity.
I've done the tutorial and the udacity miniclass.
For these reasons I'd like to see how good the UI can be using the out of the box features of saleforce. Are there any free apps I can download which manifest the best it can be?  

I've been fiddling with salesforce and a bit with the new lightning features. I am not very experienced with salesforce, but have decades of custom software development under my belt. There is a lot to like about salesforce. And, the out of the box 'controls' as I would call them using my old frame of reference as a developer, as shockingly limited. I have been using workflow rules to populate the Name field with meaningful data, but it's all incredibly clunky.
I know there are enhancements via kits like gridbuddy and skuid. But I would like to see what a very good salesforece dev can do with the out of control features. I want to know the basics before I start relying on third party packages. I realize that the lightning features will eventually push the platform more towards where I want it to be, but all of that seems a ways off in terms of maturity.
I've done the tutorial and the udacity miniclass.
For these reasons I'd like to see how good the UI can be using the out of the box features of saleforce. Are there any free apps I can download which manifest the best it can be?  

I have a custom object named Consultant that holds contact information for consultants of our company.  FirstName and LastName are the two fields within this custom object that represent the consultants name.  My issue, is that when running a lookup to this Consultant object, the record name is the value that comes up.  I can add fields to the lookup so you could see the FirstName and LastName but there is still a problem.  The object that is related to Consultant, will only show the record name in the lookup field in the record.  I want to make my record name for Consultant a formula field that is a concatenation of First Name and LastName.  The standard object Contact has a setup like this and I want to replicate it.  I don't see how to handle this if it's even possible.  Can this be done and if so, how?

 

Thanks,

 

Ralph