FWIW, you may be over-managing the issue. You could, for example, use just the filename, coupled with a FILENAME field in the header and/or footer. That would display 'My document v1.3.docx' and would update anytime the document is printed or a print preview is done. A Document_Open macro in the document's template could also be used to update the field anytime the document is opened, without triggering the alerts that a macro in the document itself might do.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Thanks Paul. You may be right, but our aim is to offload versioning onto a VCS and the version number has primacy: we want to assemble the filename in part from it, not extract the version number from the filename.

As background: the VCS goal is important to us. It costs us dearly whenever people squirrel away a document, edit it as a personal copy and email it around: by the time it re-enters the pool of collaborators it's wildly out of sync with other edits, often its filename has changed and no longer matches its cover-page title, its Version property hasn't been updated, and untraceable copies remain scattered from hell to breakfast.

It's a sloppy approach which I know we documenters tolerate, with the increasingly weak excuse that VCS isn't as flexible with binary documents as it is with text. I also know that programmers who defy a VCS regime are howled by their peers into toeing the line.