Notion Offline: My Own experience Today To Answer 4 Key Questions


Notion Offline mode is one of the main concerns you could have when you adopt notion as your daily-basis tool to organize some parts of your life or even your whole life. Because even today, there are moments, there are places when you cannot ensure a reliable internet connection to have access to all your features, so let’s see what is the current situation today regarding this notion offline mode in 2022. And these are the main questions that are asked all the time.

What can we do with notion offline?

That’s the central question we all have asked at some point. What we can do with notion is there is no internet. And it is best if you have raised that question in advance because the other scenario is that you will face it once you have no connection and try to access your workplaces.

The first page we are going to see after we start our notion offline mode will be very similar to the one you see on your online way, as you can see in the picture below:

Notion offline : Offline label shows on the page

The notion app will show your workplace and pages as usual, and a label will be printed on top, indicating that you are working without any active internet connection.

Can we create pages with notion offline?

That’s the second question we plan to answer. There is no problem with creating new pages when you have notion offline so that you can work as usual regarding the pages you want to create or update. All the modifications and changes you do will be synced to their notion servers later as soon as you get an active connection.

What can you not do with notion offline?

But to be honest, you will not be working at 100% with your notion of the workplace if you don’t have an active internet connection. Some features will not work.

For example, you cannot add images to your pages, as the current workflow is that when you add an image to your notion workplace, this image is uploaded to AWS S3. So as uploading images cannot be done, you will get an error showing that the upload has failed as you can see in the picture below:

Notion offline: Uploaded Image will fail

Also other services such as using Unsplash to change the cover of some pages will not be available, you will not get any error, but you will see that there are no results back as you don’t have the connectivity to reach Unsplash API.

Access to the Template Catalog will not be available, and this will be shown directly from the notion template when you are working with notion offline as soon as you enter the template catalog page, as it showed in the picture below:

Notion Offline: Template Catalog

Additional to that also the options to share a page will not be available, and it will offer a similar message as in the template case, recommending you to go back online to be able to share:

Notion Offline: Not able to publish

Do I need to restart notion to get back online?

When working with notion offline, you don’t need to restart it once your connection is back. As soon as you get or recover your internet connection, this will be detected by notion, and you will see the notion offline label removed. You will get access again to all the capabilities we commented on in the previous section that were not available then.

Also, the same thing will happen if we lose the connection once we have our Notion app running. This situation will be detected, and we will show the offline label on top again and the features commented will be disabled until you can provide a reliable connection.

Summary

So, in a nutshell, you have some loss of capabilities but nothing massive or critical that would affect your daily work unless it relies on the management of images. Having all this information in advance will help you prepare for this offline situation if you face it.