is this a stupid question?

We print a lot of documents in MS Access, MS Excel and MS Word, and they are stored on a shared drive that is arranged in such a way that everyone dealing with a particular project (out of several hundred currently active projects) can relatively easily find and retrieve said documents (usually in pdf format).

I've been asked if it is possible to print the path/document name on the bottom of each document for easier retrieval when users are navigating with Explorer.

I've never actually used VBA in Excel or Word, but I wonder if a standardized VBA module could be created to capture and store the path/file name, and then insert it in the page footer section of all Access reports, or Excel spreadsheets, or Word documents. These documents are created in computers around the company, though the MS Access database is a front end/back end setup where all users essentially have versions of the same programming.

Could some kind of library be created that is shared by all users/workstations with the subroutines built in?

You could incorporate my Document Management Database or Elements of it into your Access Databases, from that it is simplicity itself to print the Full Path on your Access Reports and it should be possible to pick up the data to & from Excel & Word.

please excuse my ignorance, but where might I learn about your Document Management Database?

Here it is, please note the VBA Editor Library References that need setting, there is an Excel workbook showing where to find FSO dll.
If oyu do not need to extract the name of the file you can delete that VBA.