It would be great to be able to call only the First Name of a user, instead of their entire name, for sending automated emails, greetings on welcome pages, etc.
Hi, Brandon. Text formulas do indeed provide a tool with which to separate first and last names. One problem with them, however, is that if you add a text formula after your table has been populated, the new field comes up blank. To avoid this, you need to trigger a recalculation any time a user creates a text formula (or at least those based on a NAME field). For now, what I've been doing is a batch update of my table in order to manually trigger a recalculation.
We just upgraded our Text Combo field to Text Formula! It no includes functions for getting individual values from complex fields like name or address.
http://helpdesk.knackhq.com/support/solutions/articles/5000691275-text-formulas
Hopefully if this functionality is added for the user name, it will also be available for the field "name" available for use in objects.