I had a minimalist, silky smooth installation of Office 2010 (Word, Excel, OneNote, period) until a few days ago when I had to briefly install PowerPoint and Access to help someone with a simple ...

After that, download the Uninstall Office Tool from Microsoft and then run it. Choose the Uninstall option and follow the prompted instructions to complete the uninstallation process.

In this case, you cannot uninstall or remove the Office update for these versions of Office installation. However, you can revert to a previous build number (from before the update) of Microsoft 365.