We go to the Boise office of Susan Finch Solutions a few times a year and to visit clients. Laptops are handy. I use a docking station so packing up takes less than two minutes. Working locally is great, but working on items in the cloud that I need to do is even better. Since Starlink in our car isn’t in the current budget, I have to rely on working offline through Google. Even though I can answer emails, work on docs and files, nothing will be sent until I have an internet connection. A mobile hotspot is almost acceptable, but we drive through a lot of mountains without any type of signal – cellular or wifi. It’s pretty simple to work offline, but you need to plan ahead of time.
Before you pack it up follow these steps.
- Open Gmail and then click the settings cog.
- Choose See All Settings.
- Click the tab that says “offline” and check the box to enable offline mail.
For Google Drive it’s a little different.
- Open Gmail and then click the settings cog.
- Choose See All Settings.
- Click the tab that says “offline” and check the box to enable offline work and creation of documents.
- You will need to add an extension to Chrome. To turn on offline access, install the Google Docs Offline extension to your Chrome browser.
Based on my experience, this can bog you down a bit on no-travel days. When you don’t need it, I’d suggest that you toggle it off after all of the files have synced with the cloud. You can always turn it back on with a click.
If you prefer to not add an extension, your option is to download the files and documents you will be working on, work on them locally and then update over the previous version. This is more tedious. The extension is cleaner and keeps things organized as you already to, rather than remembering where you got files from, which can cause versioning and access issues.
Working offline in the car may cause you to become car sick. If you are prone to that, don’t do it. Pretty simple advice.