The battle for the best online productivity suite is becoming increasingly fierce, especially as more companies investing in such products end up with more and more improvements aimed at customers, regardless of the platform they use.
This is one of the biggest advantages of a web-based Office suite: you're not tied to a specific platform, and a browser is pretty much all you need.
On the other hand, since everything runs on servers owned by the company offering the service, an Internet throughout this period, otherwise you cannot make changes to your documents.
Google knows this better than anyone, since the search giant offers users Docs, Sheets, and Slides, asking them to always be online when working with documents.
Today, however, everything changes, as Google is implementing a long-awaited feature that finally enables offline mode in G Suite.
The way this feature works is as simple as it could be: when an Internet connection is unavailable, any changes you make to documents are saved locally. When you come back online, Google takes care of the whole thing and automatically syncs the documents with those in the cloud.
“We know it’s important for users to access and work on their files while traveling or when connectivity is poor. With offline mode, it’s now possible to create, edit, and annotate files in Docs, Sheets, or Slides. Any changes to files while offline will sync to Drive once the user is back online,” Google explains.
Users have to manually enable this feature, and fortunately, it only takes a few clicks.
The first thing you need to do is go to Google Drive (drive.google.com), then click Settings > General. Look for an option called Sync Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Drawings to this computer so you can edit offline and turn it on. Save your settings and you're good to go.
As a summary, the steps you need to follow are as follows:
Google Drive > Settings > General > Sync Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Drawings files to this computer so you can edit offline > Enable
Google also allows users to configure an existing document to be available offline. To do this, right-click on any file > Available offline > Enable. The company explains:
“When offline access is enabled, Google Drive also automatically and intelligently makes available a number of online Google Docs/Sheets/Slides files, depending on how recently you accessed them. You can preview files that are already automatically available offline using the offline preview feature. You can also mark a file as available offline so that it always remains available offline, while in offline preview mode, as long as you are connected.”
At this point, all end users and administrators must manually enable offline access on their devices, but on the other hand, the feature is enabled by default on all Chromebooks.
What's also important to keep in mind is that Google is currently in the process of rolling out this feature to all of its customers, and the company is in the phase of gradually rolling out the feature. In other words, it doesn't seem like offline mode is available to everyone yet, but it will appear in the settings soon.
Google's planned launch indicates that implementation should be completed in about 15 days for Rapid Release domains, with the launch scheduled for May 21.
