One of the major and consistent issues with Notion over other alternatives such as Evernote or Microsoft OneNote is that it cannot be used efficiently while not connected to the internet.
Now, that’s truly troublesome when you’re on a flight or at work and you need to do important work but can’t connect to the internet. Although you can still use Notion offline, the app comes with certain limitations.
In this article, we’ll look at its limitations and see if there are any alternative options available.
Can You Use Notion Offline?
If you’ve been using Notion for a while, you’ve probably run into some issues that don’t fit with your workflow. One such is working on Notion when you are offline.
Firstly, users need to understand that Notion is a web-based application and it requires an active internet connection to work. However, it is not that you cannot use Notion in offline mode at all.
If you have preloaded the pages you want to work on and then lost the connectivity, you can still edit tables, add or make database changes, and much more. Once the internet connection is restored, all the data will be synced.
One of the major issues with this, and the reason Notion offline mode is still in progress, is data loss. So, when the internet comes back and sync is in progress, nearly 20% of the data is lost. Moreover, during the sync process, the data blocks sometimes get mixed up, which leads to a total mess.
Though Notion claims to be “100% Offline Mode,” users still need to be aware of several things, including the local cache data.
However, the best part about Notion is that it is constantly listening to its users and working to update and solve user issues and feature requests. This gives us hope that Notion will improve the offline user experience in a future release.
How To Use Notion in Offline Mode
It is clear that Notion works offline, let’s find out how to use it.
- To use Notion offline, users first need to visit the specific page when they are connected to the internet. Ensure that you have loaded all the Notion resources before going offline and stick to the tab, do not close it. We recommend using the Notion app on a desktop or mobile phone for the best experience. This ensures that the majority of your pages are downloaded and that you can access them while offline.
- When you go offline, the “Offline” tag will appear on your Notion page, indicating that the device is offline. You can then start editing your workspace or making changes to the data.
- After your changes are done, do not close the Notion page until the internet connection is back, and the data will be synced automatically.
A few things to note while using Notion offline is you won’t be able to use internet-based services along with it.
For instance, finding new templates, uploading multimedia data from the web, and similar operations. If you have Notion widgets embedded on a page, they’ll also not load. Once the internet connection is restored, then only you’ll be able to can make those specific changes.
Another major challenge is that you also won’t be able to access the new changes or newly assigned tasks by other Notion users. This can be a little problematic to manage if you’ve multiple people from your organization working on the same page or project.
Wrapping Up: Notion Offline Is Still Under Progress
Notion is an important tool for task management and project management for most companies, individuals, and teams globally and in large numbers. In such a case, offline mode is one of the biggest challenge that users are facing.
Though Notion claims you can easily use it in offline mode with no network, users are having trouble syncing and losing data. Moreover, it comes along with limitations in offline mode, making it a little inefficient compared to other alternatives.
However, it is worth waiting as Notion is constantly working on updating the issues, and you may soon find it to be working properly and more efficiently in the offline mode.
