Access Google Docs offline! Edit documents while working offline
Posted on April 1, 2008 at 5:51 am
You may have not heard the big news, but the Google Docs is now rolling out offline editing access to word processing documents over the next few weeks. This is exciting as it’s going to be the first Google web service to use the Google Gears API since Google Reader.
Basically, Google Gears is an open source platform with a Javascript API that allows web applications to work offline. Google first used Google Gears to allow users to keep up to date with their RSS feeds even while working offline. After installing Google Gears in Google Reader, a small green icon appears at the top right. This means you are online.
Clicking on the icon will download all of your unread feeds to your computer, basically synchronizing the data from the server to your computer. After the initial download is complete, you can un-plug your Internet connection and still view all of your feeds!
You can mark your feeds as read, star them, or perform any other function that you could perform online. Once you connect back up to the Internet, Google Gears will automatically synchronize the changes.
The same mechanism applies to Google Docs. The first time a user comes and clicks on the green icon, Google Gears will be installed and all the documents will be synchronized. If you lose your Internet connection, you can still view documents and make edits.
The first time the documents are synchronized will take some time if you have a large number of documents. After that, however, the process should be much faster since only changes and new documents will need to be synchronized.
To access your documents offline, just go to docs.google.com and you’ll see the icon is no longer green.
The cool thing is that the whole process is seamless. You do not have to save your documents locally before taking your computer offline. And you don’t have to remember to save your changes upload your changes once you are back online. Everything is done in the background for you! All files are downloaded and stored locally and the changes are uploaded automatically.
Unfortunately, Google Docs does not support offline access to presentations or spreadsheets, but they are working on it! If you’re one of the lucky ones who have the new feature enabled when you log in next, make sure to post a comment and let everyone know how it works! Enjoy!
Technorati Tags: google docs, google docs offline, offline access to google docs, google gears
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I will be looking forward on this new feature of Google. Thanks for sharing
pues son herramientas de verdad muy utiles y acordes a las necesidades actuales.
talvez no es el espacio pero necesito ayuda, si alguien me puede informar o sugeririme alguna pagina u otra fuente de informacion. lo que necesito saber es como maneja y como administra interiormente google docs tanto el documento como a los usuarios.
necesito para mi proyecto de grado.
saludos