Maintaining the format of linked tables.

I have a linked table in Word to an Excel spreadsheet, I format the
table in Word 'Table Properties' with the following commands,
Table tab 'Alignment - Center'
Row tab 'Repeat as header row at the top of each page'

I then close and save the document, but when I reopen the Word document,
the format of the table reverts back to the original inserted format. Is
there any way around this?

I am running Office 2000.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Kind regards

James