If I understand your issue properly, you should be able to do this by properly styling your heading and body text. This is different from formatting, and unless styles or the relevant following features only came in with 2003, what I think you need to do is open your heading style dialogue box and set your body text style as "Style for following paragraph." This way, when you hit a return after typing your heading, the next paragraph will be your body text style.

Again, I'm not familiar with '97. Does this help?

Best,
Ulodesk