You Can Actually Use a Chromebook Offline. Here’s How

Chromebooks are often sold on their tight integration with the cloud: They’re essentially windows to the web and not much else. That comes with a variety of benefits, like never having to worry about losing an unsaved document, but it also means Chromebooks are less useful than Windows or macOS laptops when you don’t have an internet connection.

However, it’s not true that Chromebooks are complete bricks while they’re offline. With advances in web app and browser technology, you can now get quite a lot done on a Chromebook without an internet connection, with all your work resyncing when Wi-Fi is available again.

Clearly, you can’t send an email or stream a video while you’re disconnected from the web—but you can work on documents and emails in an offline mode, as well as cache content to watch and listen to while you’re offline, as I’ll explain here.

Using Gmail Offline

Perhaps unsurprisingly, considering it develops ChromeOS, Google has been at the forefront of making web apps work offline for the benefit of Chromebook users. Gmail is one of the big-name apps that works offline, up to a point—you won’t be able to send or receive emails without an internet connection, but you can still work on them.

From the main Gmail interface on the web, click the gear icon (top right), then See all settings. Open the Offline tab, check the Enable offline mail setting, and a number of new options pop up. Chief among them is the drop-down menu that lets you choose how much email to sync to your Chromebook: 7, 30, or 90 days’ worth. A higher value gives you more messages to work with, but takes up more storage space. You’ll see how much space Gmail is currently using on the same screen.

On the same page, you need to choose what happens if you log out of your Google account in the ChromeOS browser. You can either keep the synced data in place (convenient if you sign back in, but potentially risky from a security standpoint), or delete it from your Chromebook (a safer option, but you will need to resync all the messages again if you sign back into Google).

Click Save Changes, and you’re done. When you’re offline, you’re able to search through and read the emails you’ve cached, as well as compose new emails and save them as drafts. Finished emails can be sent too, without actually being sent; they’ll be stored in a newly created Outbox folder, and dispatched as soon as web access is restored.

Using Google Drive Offline

You can use Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Slides while offline, as well as certain aspects of the broader Google Drive app—but as with Gmail, you need to do some preparation in advance. From Google Drive on the web, click the gear icon (top right), then select Settings.

Check the box under the Offline heading, and your recent Docs, Sheets, and Slides files will start to be synced. Google doesn’t actually specify exactly what it means by “recent,” but if there are particular files you definitely need, you can right-click on them in the main Google Drive list and choose Make available offline to save them locally.

When you’re offline, you’re able to create new documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, as well make edits to existing files. You’ll see a note at the top of the editing interface telling you you’re working in an offline mode, and any changes you make automatically get synced as soon as your Chromebook’s internet connection returns.

There are certain features that aren’t available while you’re offline. You can’t access the history of the file you’re working on, for instance, and revert back to an earlier version (though the undo tool still works). You can’t share files with other people either. And indeed, shared files can’t be synced offline.

Using Netflix, Spotify, and YouTube Offline

Since ChromeOS supports Android apps—which can be downloaded onto your Chromebook via the Play Store app you’ll find in the launcher—you have more options when it comes to using your Chromebook offline. A lot of apps will be configured to cache content locally for times when you don’t have an internet connection, without you having to do anything extra.

Sometimes you will need to set up offline use though. In the Netflix app, for example, you can open the My Netflix tab, then click Downloads, and Set up. You’ll be able to specify how much local storage the app can use, and which movies and shows are downloaded. Titles can be manually saved, and Netflix can also automatically save content based on your viewing activity (saving all the episodes of a series you’re currently watching, for example).

When it comes to the Spotify app, there’s an offline feature here too. Click the downward arrow icon at the top of any playlist or album, and it’ll be saved to your Chromebook’s local storage—you’ll then be able to enjoy your tunes without internet access. From the Home tab, click your profile picture, then Settings and Privacy and Audio quality to set the quality level of your downloads. This affects how much room they take up, since higher quality files require more space, but if you’re a stickler for good sound, that’s storage space well spent.

There’s also YouTube: In this case you can download videos in the web browser as well as the Android app, but you need to have an active YouTube Premium subscription for this to work. When you’re watching a video, click the three dots beneath it and then click Download to save it locally. Click your profile picture (top right), then Settings and Downloads to configure the download quality. If you turn on smart downloads, a selection of videos from your recommendations will be automatically saved for offline viewing.