Chapter 7 Working Offline
Chromebooks are primarily meant to be used with an Internet connection. This is because most of the software you are using is through an Internet browser. So you will want to make sure you have Internet access when you are working on your Chromebook whenever possible.
But sometimes you won’t have access to the Internet. Fortunately, some of the Chromebook Apps and functionality are available offline. You can use these to work when you can’t get an Internet connection. Then your changes will appear online when you reconnect.
7.0.1 Google Drive
As we discussed in a previous section, the Files App shows files both from your Google Drive and in a “Downloads” folder. All the files in your “Downloads” folder are saved directly on your Chromebook and are available even if you aren’t connected to the Internet. But you can also store files on your Google Drive. The advantage of Google Drive is that all your files are stored online. This means they won’t be lost if you lose your Chromebook and will be accessible from any Internet connected computer. However, sometimes when you don’t have access to the Internet you may want to access your files offline.
You can make Google Drive files available offline on your Chromebook. To do so you need to open the Google Drive App on your Chromebook. You can find the Google Drive App by opening the apps using the launcher button and clicking on the Google Drive icon.
To confirm that you are set to work offline open the Google Drive App
Once you have opened Google Drive you can open the Settings in the upper right hand corner.
Open the Google Drive Settings
Then you can confirm that the box is checked next to the “Offline” setting. This means that all of your Google Slides presentations, Google Docs text files, and Google Sheets data files will be available offline. This will use up storage on your Chromebook, but will let you work even when your computer is not connected to the Internet.
Confirm that the setting to work offline is turned on
7.0.2 Example: editing a text file offline
One of the most common things you might want to do when you don’t have Internet access is to write in a text file. You can do this with a number of different apps. But the one we will use most frequently is Google Docs. You will learn more about Google Docs in a future course, but for now we will show you how offline editing works. First, click on the Google Docs icon to open up the Google Docs App. Note you may have to click on the launcher window to find this App if it is not pinned to your shelf. When Google Docs is open you can click on the plus sign to create a new document.
Open Google Docs and create a new document
Now you should add some text by typing in the Google Doc, this text will automatically be saved on the Google Doc online.
Add some text to the Google Doc online
To test offline editing you need to turn off wifi on your computer. You can do that by clicking the avatar picture in the bottom right hand side of the screen to bring up your global options. Then you can click on the wifi connection to open up the wifi options.
Open your wifi options
You can turn off wifi and your Internet connection by clicking the dot at the top of the wifi menu. Now your Chromebook is offline.
Turn off wifi by clicking the dot.
Now you can open the Google Docs App back up by clicking on the Google Docs icon at the bottom of your screen. You can still make edits to the document created while you are offline.
You can still edit the Google Doc offline.
When you are working offline the offline icon will appear next to the file name.
The offline icon appears next to the file name.
When you are editing a file offline you will see that it says “All changes saved offline” at the top of the window next to the file name. This means that changes to your online document won’t happen until you reconnect to the Internet.
Changes are not saved to the file on the Internet until you reconnect.
To see how this works you can open back up the wifi menu and turn the Internet connection back on by again going through the menu opened by clicking on your avatar on the lower right hand side of the screen.
Turn the wifi back on.
Right after you turn the wifi back on you will briefly see that it says “Saving” at the top of the document next to the file name. This means that the changes you have made to the file are being saved from the version on your Chromebook to the version on the Internet.
Changes are saved when you go back online.
In a similar way you can also edit presentations and spreadsheets offline using Google Slides and Google Sheets. We will cover those Apps more in a separate course. One thing that is worth noting is that if you work with files offline, then the version you change will update the version of the file online. So if you have shared a document with someone else, when you edit that document offline and re-connect, it might write over some of their changes to the file.
7.0.3 Offline Apps
In addition to the main apps from Google, many other apps and extensions offer Offline functionality. Some will be fully functional when they are offline and some will only partially work. When you open the Google Web Store you can specifically search for Apps that have offline functionality. But you will need to review each App to figure out what is available when you are online or offline.
You can search for apps that say they have offline functionality.