Try building a table in Excel. First, remove everything except one worksheet in the Excel workbook. Second, place your table labels in row 1, starting in column 1. When you are finished entering the data for your table, go to the menu, then Insert Table. You can then change the default color scheme for the table and give the table a name.

If you create a table in Word in exactly the same way as what you have in Excel, your links may talk to each other more fluently. Or, you could paste the table from Excel into Word and save yourself the extra work.