For my work, I am using a 2016 edition of Office, and the software lives on my hard drive. There is no connection to the cloud whatsoever. However I have a tablet and another laptop that use the online Office subscription, so I will definitely do as you report here for options. I didn't have any trouble finding an earlier edition of Office and getting it to work on my Win7 machine. One of the reasons for doing this is not wanting the intrusions of later versions of Windows. It's strictly for my writing. Web surfing and research happen on the tablet, which is run by Android. Thought I'd mention this in case anyone else here would like to escape Win11.