I use Notion on a daily basis and I’m a huge advocate. Productivity and note-taking bundled up in a nice package? Tick and tick!
Is this the holy grail of productivity software? Before we answer that, let’s see if there are any drawbacks.
Can Notion Be Accessed Offline?
The short answer is Notion does not have a “true” offline function. That being said, you can use elements of Notion while offline. It just doesn’t provide the best user experience.
Why didn’t they build an offline function?
You need to remember that Notion is primarily a web-based application and it does save your data to the cloud almost instantaneously. You do need an active internet connection for functionality like that!
However, there are some workarounds that allow you to access certain pages offline.
Interesting read – 7 Notion Features To Save You Time
How To Use Notion in Offline Mode
To enable offline mode, you need to preload pages while you’re connected to the internet. This allows the app to locally cache pages for offline editing. DO NOT close the app, otherwise, the offline mode doesn’t work!
Tip – Right-click on pages you want to keep open and click “Open in new window”. This will allow you to open several pages and store them for offline use.
Once you are offline, you can find the “Offline” tag on your page.
The other major issue is that the offline updates don’t always get synchronized back to the server properly, so you may end up losing some data.
My suggestion is to duplicate pages you’re offline editing and merge once you’re back online. This helps to avoid any data loss.
Final Thoughts
Do I see this as a deal breaker for Notion? No, not really.
In this day and age, we spend most of our time connected to the Internet and it’s rare not to be able to find a hotspot. Until Notion developers release a full offline mode, we’ll need to make do with the local cache workaround.
Hope you found this helpful!
You may also like to read How To Lock Notion.
