Excel links not maintaining format when updated in Word 2013

I have a problem where I have a table created in word, and certain cells in the table contain links to an excel spreadsheet that contains text in the cell (like a text description). I copy the cell I wish to obtain the information from, and do a special paste into a table cell with paste link -> unformatted unicode text. I then format the entire cell into the font and fontsize and bold/italics as needed. However, whenever the link is updated due to new content in Excel, the resulting table cell in Word does not maintain the formatting for the entire cell, instead having parts of it in the correct format, and other parts in the default format of the word document. 

I have messed around with settings and searched the internet for a week now to no avail (apparantly nobody ever saw this as an issue), but for my purposes where I would like to have as little human intervention as possible, I want to be able to not have to go into the document and fix every cell so the contents in individual cells are correctly formatted. It should be noted that the formatting between cells will be inconsistent due to the nature of the work, but the content inside a single table cell should be consistent, but an updated excel link changes the formatting if the new text contains a space that was not in the previous link. 

To replicate this, Create a table cell in word, assign any formatting other than your current default (such as changing font size to size 7, add bold and italics), then link a cell with random text in excel via special paste by going paste options -> paste link -> unformatted unicode text. What you will see is that the link keeps default formatting and places it infront of the table cell formatting. If you highlight the entire cell again and change the formatting to what is wanted, the current version of the link is now in the proper format. However, if you update the link by changing the text in excel and it contains spaces (or basically more words), the first words will be in the correct formatting, while the last few words will be in the default formatting. The table cell will not be in consistent formatting after update.

Help would be appreciated as this is driving me crazy.