Updates to Google Docs app for Android: Offline access and improved tablet experience

Wednesday, February 1, 2012 | 9:40 AM


There may be times when you don’t have an Internet connection on your Android device, but you still want access to a file you’ve saved in Google Docs. Now you can select any file in Google Docs to make it available offline. So regardless of whether you’re connected to the internet, you’re always connected to those files.

Even better, Google Docs automatically updates your offline files when you’re on Wi-Fi. You can also manually update files anytime you have a data connection by opening the file or tapping ‘Update’ from the Offline section of the app.


Make file available offlineUpdate online file

Make file available offline

Update offline file

For those of you with Android tablets, we’ve also improved the Google Docs reading experience. Now, when you open a Google document on your tablet while online, you’ll get a high-resolution version of the document. Swipe left and right to flip between pages, or use the slider at the bottom to page ahead quickly.


New reading layout on Android tablet

You can learn more about offline capabilities and the new reading layout in our Help Center.

Whether you’re offline or online, these improvements will make it easier to be productive from anywhere.

Posted by: Freeman Liu, Software Engineer

16 comments:

Shawn said...

still can't do the very basic thing of selecting or changing a collection.

How has that not been applied this whole time?

BitShift said...

So when will native document editing be added? I don't use this app because it still has bad (mobile web based) document editing support. This has got to be the most requested feature for this app.

Will said...

Someday, one of these much-lauded updates will bring the all-important Native Editing that everyone has been asking for since day one.

Until that day, the app remains effectively useless.

Gary13579 said...

A pretty pathetic update. If you're going to use a mobile HTML backend for editing files, at least make sure it isn't absolutely bloody terrible! Editing a word document in Google Docs is an order of magnitude more painful than using Notepad on a Windows 95 machine. It has practically zero functionality outside of "typing text", the editing UI is slow and buggy, and don't even get me started on the abomination of a spreadsheet editor it has.

Google Docs is an amazing service and having a good client for Android would be a huge huge plus. As it stands, this app is worthless, which is sad because it has such potential.

Andrew said...

Whats this??? Google posting usage of a task killer on honeycomb/ICS? I thought this was a big no no!!!!

BAD GOOGLE!!!!

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Hiekel Essterol said...

Why has it not been made possible to apply this to a collection of documents?

I have a folder containing 30 something documents that I could really use offline access to.

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