After some digging I found that searching this forum for “howto” leads to some good finds. This one particularly was helpful
link to other help
So to solve my issue I added my nextcloud domain to etc/hosts with the ip of my nextcloud
127.0.0.1 localhost
X.X.X.X cloud.DOMIAN.com
then edited loolwsd.xml with nano /etc/loolwsd/loolwsd.xml
adding server address to the server_name desc line and adding another host desc line with the nextcloud address
<server_name desc="Hostname:port of the server running loolwsd. If empty,
it's derived from the request." type="string" default="">cloud.DOMAIN.com</server_name>
...
<host desc="Regex pattern of hostname to allow or deny." allow="true">cloud.DOMAIN.com</host>
Go through the guide it is good. Except the person did put <server_name desc="Hostname:port of the server running loolwsd. If empty, it's derived from the request." type="string" default="">cloud.DOMAIN.com:9981</server_name> stating the port number which didn’t work for me and gave 9981 which isn’t being listened on, but I might be missing something.
Hope this helps someone else.