Once you click on “ Turn on” then it’ll start downloading copies of all your documents in the background, while showing you this on the lower left edge: Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that you can pick and choose individual documents at this point, it’s an all or nothing step. On the menu you again see “Available offline” but this time when you click on the switch to enable it, you’ll see this prompt: Now go back to your Google Docs view and click on the three-dot icon again. Good news is that there’s no reason to quit and restart the browser either it just adds the new feature immediately. 😆Ĭlick on “ Add to Chrome” (even if you’re using Microsoft Edge) and it’s a matter of a few seconds to have it installed and ready to go. Yes, you need to be online to install the offline access Chrome extension. It’s easy enough, click on the “ Install” button (or, if you want to get here a different way, go to the Extensions library and search for “Docs Offline”).

INSTALL THE GOOGLE DOCS OFFLINE ACCESS EXTENSION Once you do that, you’ll immediately be prompted to install the necessary Chrome extension: To start out, a click on the three vertical dots on that particular file’s entry here in list view offers this menu:Īs you might guess, the key is to click on the slider icon adjacent to “Available offline”.

I’m going to set up offline access for “Formatting Test Doc”. To start out, I’ll jump into Google Docs by going to and changing it to show only my docs, sorted by last access date: Ready? Let’s get to it! REQUEST OFFLINE ACCESS IN GOOGLE DOCS I use Edge, so that’s what I’ll utilize for this tutorial, but the process would be completely identical in Chrome.

It’s pretty easy to set up Offline Access for Google Docs, but it’s going to work best in Google Chrome or any of the Chromium-based Web browsers like Microsoft Edge. But… that’d be true if you were using Microsoft Word or Apple Pages on your local system too, right? It’s a pretty cool trick if you think about it, with the only problem being that while you’re editing offline, your clients have no way of knowing that you’re changing things. Then, phase two, the ability to actually work on documents while you were offline, with all of your changes and updates saved and auto-applied once you were online again. First, there was the always-online version where you could edit within a Web browser as if it were a standalone app. I like to think of Google Docs as having evolved in two distinct phases.

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