I don't have the english version of Open Office, so I describe it with german
texts, perhaps someone can translate it to english:

Open Calc
Go to Ansicht, Datenquellen
Take an query or table and pull it into the table
Your data is there, fine. Now format the table (take some colors for some rows,
make the caption a bit bigger and so on).

Now, go to Daten, Bereich aktualisieren.

All your formatting is away, nothing's left of your work.

I think, Calc should only import data and should leave the formatting as it was
(Microsoft Excel 2002 does it in this way).

By the way: why isn't there a status message while Calc is importing some data?
When it's a little bit more (let's say 30000 cols with about 20 rows each) you
never know, how far Calc is.