Not to discourage your efforts in creating a procedure to do what you want
with the page numbering, but there are a few things to bear in mind as you
do so. Excel is subject to users adding rows and columns as well as varying
their height and width respectively. Cells might be shifted as users
configure data on the worksheets and a few other quirks that can alter page
numbers, even if you can get them calculated correctly the first time.
Trying to write code to cover all of these possibilities could be a
nightmare. I think that is why it is not a built in feature and why the
internal calculation that is done is kept until the print preview is called.
At that point, it can calculate what would be printed based on the page
setup parameters that the user has entered. That is another glitch, the
user can also change between protrait and landscape, or change the paper
size. It goes on and on. While it might be convenient to see which
printed page you are working on as you go through a worksheet, I am not sure
it is a real advantage in terms of the effort it would take to write the
code to get it.