A DuckDuckGo search for
how to uninstall word on a mac turned up are found
Microsoft's official instructions,
this WikiHow article and
this Nektony article specifically on removing Word. It also yielded a number of other articles on removing Microsoft Office and a nice selection of YouTube videos. You do not necessarily lose any settings or data, it all depends on the technique you use.
Installing is accomplished simply by running the installer.
A subscription guarantees access to future updates and upgrades, so long as you continue to pay the subscription price and Microsoft continues to develop and support the product. You still must accept and install the updates when they are released. In essence, you are paying for the updates in advance and helping guarantee Microsoft continues to support the product. Like it or not, subscriptions are a financially rational response, to the current market environment. However, I should point out there are any number of products on the market that can read, edit, and
export documents in .docx format including
Pages,
Mellel 5,
Nisus Writer Pro 3, and the StarOffice variants
NeoOffice and
LibreOffice Vanilla. As far as I am concerned, choosing among them is a matter of finding the one that best fits your personal tastes and all but the StarOffice variants are, in my opinion, less cluttered and easier to use than Word and yield equal results and all are far less expensive and quircky than Word.