Is it possible to make a merge field work like a "basic" field to do look ups?

I have a "production company" field that i set up with a drop down so I can see a list of 2 fields: "prod co id" and "prod co name" (this is great)

When I select one the "prod co id" is displayed properly and the "prod co name" displays and based off of the "prod co id" the look up perfoms and all my look up data auto enters. ( also great!)

the only problem is id like to have information from 2 fields displayed in the "production co" field.

I tried the merge field and had it display what i was looking for but is this similar to all other fields? can I give a merge field a name and have it set as a look up field too? '

gosh, does that even make any sense?

Im going to re read the section on merge fields but if you can make sense of my question and can assist...thank you!!

I think I found my answer..

Merge fields are for display and can not be given a "field name" which would prevent me from performing look ups.

No. A merge field is a field. It's just placed on a layout in a different way.

It sounds like what you're doing now is using a pop-up menu on an ID field and using the value list feature of showing a second field. Is that right? And you want to add a third field? You can create a new field that concatenates the second and third fields and use that as your second field instead.

Oh, and to follow up on comment's point, try putting a merge field on in the body of a layout and viewing it in Table view.

Where should i go to figure that out, that would be awesome. It would save me some additional typing and prevent me from having to make a field validation.

And yes that is exactly what I am doing with the drop down feature.

Im just thankful you all had a clue what i was talking about...

thanks!

It's simple. Create a calculation field with a result of text. That calc field equal to the two non-key fields separated by & " " & . Then use that new field as the second field instead of the current field.

Thank you so very much! That worked out perfectly.

Now I just want to look at what Ive put together so far and see if i can use that elsewhere.