How to Work with Google Docs Offline?

February 10, 2022

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In this tutorial, we enable offline editing for Google Docs, Google Slides, and Google Sheets. We recommend you study this manual on how to work with Google Docs offline carefully and start practicing.

Checklist of crucial points we aim to highlight here:

Setting Up Offline Editing
Enabling Offline Doc Editing
Checking Availability

Back in the days when Google Docs, Google Slides, and Google Sheets were relying on the constant internet connection, the sudden disconnect meant that all your progress got lost in a second. That is why nowadays, we enable offline access to the Google Docs that are getting seamlessly saved to your computer, so you can edit them even if the network is down. And once you are back online, all edits you’ve made while being offline will automatically synchronize with an online version of the document, and you can keep working on it as usual. That’s how it works. So, let`s start.

Watch the video from https://thegoodocs.com/ and find out how to work with Google Docs offline:

Setting Up Offline Editing

To enable offline document editing, we open our Google Drive, locate a gear icon at the top right corner, and click on it. Then select “Settings” here

In this new menu, scroll down a bit and locate the “Offline” line, next to which we check the box. And it brings up this warning, saying that the function requires a Chrome extension. So, we press “INSTALL”

That is sending us to the Chrome Web Store with Google Docs Offline extension. And next to it, we press “Add to Chrome”, confirming it on top

And once you get this notification, the extension is installed, and we get back to the document right where we left it. But now we can finally check this box. And here we are

Close it with “Done” here

Enabling Offline Doc Editing

Once this is done, Google Drive will start downloading some of your recent files, so you can edit them even if they are not open now. But yet it doesn’t do it for all the documents. This is why our next step is to select which documents we want to be available offline individually.

Further on, it’s likely that all docs you are currently working on will be automatically saved and ready for offline use. But now we'll make some of them synchronize automatically all the time so that we won’t lose even a single line of text.

To do that, on your Google Drive, locate that exact document, right mouse click on it, and look for the “Available offline” line, press the switch, and it will start downloading it in the background. Now the document is ready for offline use

You can go on and enable offline access to other docs or select a range of files by selecting several necessary files at once with the mouse or holding CTRL on Windows or CMD on Mac and selecting them one by one. Then you right mouse click on either one of the selected docs and press “Available offline” in the menu. That will enable offline access to multiple docs at once

Checking Availability

And in the end, to check which documents are available offline, go to the top right corner on Google Drive and click here on a circle with a checkmark (“Ready for offline”)

Then toggle “Offline preview”

And now the files that are working offline are highlighted like this

While inactive ones look like this, which are more gray and transparent

We hope this tutorial will help you learn how to work with Google Docs offline. Good luck!

Written by

Team TheGoodocs

We are a team of creative people who dream of sharing knowledge and making your work and study easier. Our team of professional designers prepares unique free templates. We create handy template descriptions for you to help you choose the most suitable one. On our blog, you'll find step-by-step tutorials on how to use Google Products. And our YouTube channel will show you all the ins and outs of Google products with examples.