This issue is based on OpenOffice version 1.0.1, as distributed with Red Hat
Linux 8.0, with updates to 22-Sep-2003.

When entering text into a cell, oocalc by default normalizes the capitalization
to having the first letter capitalized and all further letters lower-case.
Reading the issues database, this is apparently the intended behavior.
However, it is Very Surprising to the naive user and it is Inconvenient, and
it is entirely Non-Obvious how to defeat this behavior.

(For reference, go to Tools->AutoCorrect->Options, then un-check "Correct TWo
INitialCApitals" and "Capitalize first letter of every sentence".  I discovered
this only by searching the issues database, which is not adequate for non-expert
users.)

While this may appear to be a trivial matter, I have been recently making a
spreadsheet of names and addresses of companies, and a considerable number
of Internet-related companies have names that start with lower-case letters,
and use upper-case letters internally.  By default, oocalc incorrectly
normalizes both of these, making it impossible to feed the correct names into
a mail-merge program.

It may be useful to retain the capitalization-normalization feature as an
option, but it should by no means be the default, as it leads to behavior
that surprises the naive user.

(Note that the main competitor does not normalize capitalization.)