Google Drive is more than storage. It is a productivity suite that can open, edit and save in native Microsoft Office formats. In this tutorial we’ll show you how to configure your computer to be able to create Excel documents in Google Drive without any network connectivity. There is some initial setup that has to be done to enable this functionality. Follow these steps.
- Open Chrome and go to drive.google.com
- Click the gear at the top right and Settings
- Check the box beside ‘Offline’ and click DONE
- You’ll see the banner at the bottom for ‘Setting up offline…’. When this is complete you’ll see an icon left of the gear. It’s an underlined check in a circle. This indicates you are ready for offline use.
Now you can access drive.google.com without internet access and create new Google Sheets. They will be stored locally until you have internet access again, at which time they will synchronize with the network. When you are online you can right click on the Google Sheet and click Download. It will download an XLS file that can be opened with Excel.