GridView basics

Hello, here are some basic GridView questions. I'm using a GridView in
Visual Web Developer to display data from an SQLServer database. I use
C# as programming language.

- How can I format the text in a column. I'm looking for some event
handler that takes the value from the database and formats it for
rendering it on the webpage. Is using a TemplateField the right
direction?
- Some columns in the query contain codes that should be looked up in
lookup tables. I don't want to join all of those tables in the query,
but look them up at display time and render the description in stead
of the code. Is there a typical precooked way to do this?
.