Going Offline with Google

Google is all about the cloud.  Everything should be done online.  Unfortunately internet access is not as ubiquitous as we might like.  We may be in a car or other transport.  Our home internet could be on the fritz.  We may be visiting in a building without WiFi (or more likely with WiFi we cannot access).  Even our phone's 4G connection is not available everywhere.  There are other times when offline is simply easier or faster.

Email Offline

In these cases, there are some good offline solutions.  Offline mail readers are available in many situations.  For the computer, there are good offline mail programs such as MS Outlook, or the free Mozilla Thunderbird.  Google also has a Chrome App called "Gmail Offline".  Any of these will store your mail and make it available to you offline.

The mail programs on most phones will allow you to access your existing messages and draft messages to be sent once Internet is available again. However, most by default will only store your for the last few weeks by default. This is done to reduce the amount of data stored on the relatively small drives on most phones and tablets.  You can usually change the settings to store all of your mail, but this may quickly fill up all of your phone's drive storage capacity.

Any of these programs will allow you access to all of your mail messages even when there is no Internet connection.  You may also find them more convenient to use in situations where the Internet is running too slowly.  I like the Google Offline option as it has a light footprint on my computer, although if you have a great many emails, you still have to accommodate room on your hard drive for all of those.

Document Editing Offline

Working on documents has traditionally been an offline process.  If you have WordPerfect, MS Office, or LibreOffice installed, you don't need internet access to use them.

But with more and more documents being stored in the cloud, this can become an issue.  If you store many of your documents in Google Drive, as I do, you enjoy the ability to access them from almost anywhere, and don't have to worry about keeping files in sync on different devices.  But accessing Google Drive is contingent on accessing it through the Internet.  I have the Google Drive App installed on both my laptop and tablet.  This allows me to access documents offline as they are stored in a designated folder on my device.  Drive will automatically sync my changes as soon as the device gets back online.

Maps Offline

I am a big fan of Google Maps, as you may already know from my earlier post on the topic.  But the place where maps are most useful is when I am on the move, and least likely to have internet access.  Sure, I can view maps on my phone, but the screen is often too small to be convenient.  On my tablet, the Google Maps App allows an option to save a portion of the map for offline use.  If I know ahead of time I will be somewhere I need the map, I can save it.  I then have it available for viewing when I am on the road.  This is useful for a particular area, but unfortunately, you are limited in how much you can save, making offline use for longer trips impossible.

There is not an offline option that I could find for Windows.  Perhaps someday there will be a Chrome App for this, but I could not find one now.  There is, however, a free open source program called GmapCatcher which can do the same thing.  I will download a portion of Google Maps, or other online map programs, for you to access on your computer offline.  The trick there is that you need to go online to all the zoom levels you may later want to use.  If you do that, they are saved and available for offline use.