There’s one feature that fans of the popular note taking service Notion have wanted for a really long time. No, it’s not website management, or even AI. It’s the simple ability to edit offline. Until now, to use Notion in any meaningful way, you had to have an active internet connection. That was fine most of the time, but what if you wanted to quickly edit a document while on the train, or upload something to your travel plans when out of coverage?
Those edge cases separated Notion from other options like Obsidian or even the Apple Notes app. Now, though, Notion is finally adding an offline editing feature. But it might not work like you’d expect.
Your expectation might be that when you’re offline, all your documents will show up as they did the last time Notion was connected to the internet. You could then make edits, so that the next time you’re online, those changes would be synced back to Notion. Unfortunately, you’ll instead have to be more proactive and enable the feature on specific documents before going offline.
How to enable and use Notion in offline mode
In Notion, the offline feature takes some work. If you’re using Notion for free, you’ll have to enable offline mode for individual Notion pages and documents to see them without a connection. If you’re paying for Notion and are using the Plus, Business or Enterprise plans, Notion will do some of the work for you, but not all. For these accounts, Notion will automatically download your recent and favorited pages, but to see others while offline, you’ll still need to manually download them.
You can do this from the Notion desktop app or from the mobile app. Open the Notion page you want to edit while offline, then click the three-dotted Menu button. Enable the Available Offline feature. You’ll see a progress bar as the page downloads.
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Credit: Khamosh Pathak
Now, any changes that you make to the document will be saved locally, and will sync automatically when your device connects to the internet.
Credit: Khamosh Pathak
Notion also has a dedicated Offline section in the Settings menu where you can see all the pages that you’ve downloaded. To remove a downloaded page, click the three-dotted menu button next to the page listing and choose the Remove offline page option. If you’re a paying Notion user, you can also disable the Automatic downloads feature here, too.