If you want to put in the effort you can sniff the hostname lookups and if it's done halfway dedicated name, as an entry for 0.0.0.0 to the hosts file.

Hosts file would be your first way assuming you trust MS to honor that convention. You can always consider using a way that is not reliant on Windows goodwill ( for example, Pihole would allow you to limit various unwanted IPs based on your custom list; technically, your router should be able to do it too, but it varies wildly by mfctr/model ). That said, I am not that familiar with that functionality in Excel and it is not a given that it would fail gracefully if it is actually stopped from calling mothership.

I've been running a PiHole for a couple of years now and love it. It's hard to go on anyone else's network.

I use W10Privacy. It blocks all MS servers except those needed to get updates and antivirus definitions.

That looks like exactly what I was looking for, cheers. Windows auto-identifies the download as a virus, but I see the author has a page about this frustration on the website.