I simply want to know how to turn off iCloud* without losing my contacts

Question

Call me old fashioned, but I really do NOT want to use iCloud EXCEPT for ONE THING*: and that's to find my phone, ipad or laptop if it goes missing.
Having said that, I have figured out how to turn off icloud on my ipad and my iphone (I am not using the phone as a phone, just as a glorified ipod) while keeping the "find my ipad/iphone" function active, BUT
I can't quite figure out how to do it on my laptop.
I seem to have done it already for photos, and for the calendar, (I know this from checking iCloud to see what it's got) but just cannot figure out how to turn it off for contacts.
And YES, I've backed up all of those things at LEAST 3 different ways, I just don't want the Cloud to be one of them.
So can anyone tell me how to turn off contacts in the cloud without it also magically deleting them in my laptop? (I had it happen on the ipad, that's why I'm worried.)
Thank you for understanding-I'm older and this stuff just keeps getting more complicated and I'm a simple person. I'll back up my own stuff!

Answer 1

If you are refering to documents such as Pages and Numbers files....
The only way around this is to "save as" you icloud documents using the associated app to a local folder on your mac.  Then turn off icloud.
Of course, when you sign off of icloud, the docs are removed from the mac, but remain in icloud.  In the future when you sign back in, the documents are available to you again.
Oh, and the icloud documents are also stored locally in ...
~/Library/Mobile Documents
Note that Library in the user's home folder is now hidden, so you'll have to set Finder to view hidden files.
The Mobile Documents folder has subfolder where copies of the doc/data files are stored.
You can move these files to another folder to save them.