Hi Dave,
If I understand correctly what you're trying to do it sounds like you have two approaches...a push approach or a pull approach. Chris' suggestion, which is an interesting approach, is what I'd call a push approach where you're trying to push some information or communicate from MS Word to PB.
The pull approach would be trying to pull that information from MS Word using PB. Any reason why you wouldn't just connect to that document from PB and, via properties/ methods of MS Word object model, check whether those fields/ bookmarks were filled in? This could be done for a bookmark using something like...
ls_bookmark_value = My_Ole_Word.ActiveDocument.Bookmarks.item("BOOKMARKNAME").Range.Text
...and compare that to whatever the default value is when a bookmark is not filled in yet.
Again, maybe with your use case you need to have that initiated from MS Word and so this may not work for you.
HTH...regards,
Mark