My understanding - and that's liable to be very wrong - is that a page number is a very ephemeral thing in Word and therefore not stored in the file. The issue is that it depends on the computer and the available printers. The available fonts and the selected paper size have a major effect on the pagination, so this is not decided by Word until print time. Therefore, any page number you get out of Word is going to be unreliable and my understanding is that, while it can be calculated by Word most of the time given a configuration, it won't store that information and therefore it can't be extracted from a different machine.
Regards,
John Davies
