# Notion Finally Works Offline ## Метаданные - **Канал:** Thomas Frank - **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ued3fwBzsL0 - **Источник:** https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/20787 ## Транскрипт ### Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00) [] I've been using Notion pretty much every day over the past seven years. And during that time, there has been one feature request that both I and pretty much everyone else who has used Notion has had at the top of their Santa's wish lists over everything else. They have wanted an offline mode. Well, today, my friends, is the promised day because today marks the launch of an honest to goodness offline mode in Notion. Now you can go to the little three dot menu on any page in notion and you can click available offline. And in the device where you did that, it's going to be available when you go offline on a plane into the Bolivian wilderness wherever you're going where the Wi-Fi isn't. And that's in a sense kind of all you need to know about this feature. You can do this in an unlimited number of pages in any workspace regardless of your Notion plan. It even works on the free plan and that'll allow you to access your pages offline and make edits that will sync back to the notion servers when you go back online. In another sense, there is quite a lot to learn about this feature. I've been testing it pretty extensively over the past few months in beta. I have uncovered bugs. I have gone on deep dives learning all that I can about how notion has accomplished it and why it's so hard. And I've even written a 5,000word article covering as much detail as possible on everything about this feature from block support to uh the different methods for offlining pages to different limitations and considerations. What I want to do in this video is not go line by line through this huge article. Instead, what I want to do in this particular video is give you the basic facts about how offline mode works and to give you some recommendations and best practices for how to work offline mode into your daily habits. Both if you're a personal notion user as well as if you're using Notion in a team setting. So, let's jump right into it. As always, there are timestamps in the description down below if you want to skip around. But essentially, make a page offline available in Notion, once again, back over to my screen share mode. We'll alt tab. You can go to this little three dot menu up in the top corner and you can click available offline. That will make all the content on the page available for offline use once you get onto a plane or somewhere else. And I did a lot of testing of this feature on a plane actually because I took a flight to St. Louis recently and wouldn't you know it, American Airlines is still nickel and dimming their passengers on paid in-flight Wi-Fi and I'm not willing to buy it. So, I wrote a lot of the script for this video actually on that plane ride using this offline mode and it works pretty great. Now, one thing that I do want to note is that the subpages on a page that you enable for offline mode are not automatically going to be enabled offline themselves. It doesn't cascade like that, at least not here at launch. So, and this is important. If you want all of these pages, say in your little content planner for a content project to be available offline, you will want to go into those pages as well and toggle those available offline as well. Another really important detail is that offline availability is per device and it works in the desktop apps and also in mobile apps. And again, it's per device. So, if you make a page available offline in your laptop, then you go on the plane and you get on your phone, you're going to be disappointed when you don't see it offline available on your phone. Now, that is for manual offlining because there are actually some ways that automatically will offline pages as well. And I'm going to quickly switch over to the article here just so you can kind of see uh what I'm talking about as I'm talking through it. So, there are basically four different ways that pages can be automatically made available for offline viewing. The first one is if you create a page while you're offline. That one kind of makes sense. If you're offline, you create a page, it's got to be available offline, and once you get back online, it's going to sync that page, its creation event, and all of its content back up to Notion's servers. In addition, and this one also works on the free plan, uh the first 50 pages in the first database view in an offline available page are supposed to become available offline themselves. And I have a actual section here in the article that kind of covers this. Um, I'll talk about this maybe a little bit later in the video, but this is quite an inconsistent experience in my testing. Uh, for example, we can see here that notion's documentation actually states when you download a database or page containing a database, the first 50 rows of the first view will be downloaded. But here I've got the first view of my note-taking section in my offline enabled copy of Ultimate Brain, my template for personal life management. And you can see here I do not have 50 pages that are available offline. So there's some wonkiness going on here. And I personally wouldn't trust this particular offline feature. Uh at least not at launch. Again, I really recommend just hitting that three dot menu and clicking available offline manually for any page that you want to have reliably accessible offline. Now, if you're on a paid plan, there are a couple of other ways that pages can become offline enabled, and I find at least one of them ### Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00) [5:00] to be a bit more reliable. So, the top 20 pages in your favorites sidebar section will also be automatically downloaded if you want them to be, and they will be by default. And then also the first 20 pages in your recently visited section. So, I'll go ahead and show you those really quick here. If we're in a workspace, um, my favorites are going to be right here in the sidebar, and the top 20 entries in this favorites section are going to be automatically downloaded for offline use. In addition, your most recently viewed pages, which you can see if you go to Notion Home right here. Uh, you'll see in the recently visited section, the first 20 will also be automatically downloaded for offline use as well. Now, if you want to see all the pages that are available for offline use, you can go to your little settings section right here, which pro tip, command or control, comma, is the keyboard shortcut for getting there. And then you can go to this brand new little offline section right here. And first, I'll note that if you're on a paid plan, you actually have the ability to turn off or on these automatic downloads. And then perhaps most importantly, if we go down here, we can see a list of all of our offline enabled pages. And we can actually also filter this list by either the pages that we have manually downloaded which in my case are just these three or we can filter by the pages that notion has automatically made available for offline use here. With that said, I want to now move into supported features when you are offline. And if we go back to screen share mode, you will see that in the article, which again is linked in the description down below, I created a whole section that sort of covers both what works offline and what doesn't work offline. And I also included a chart of block type support, both the blocks that you can view on a page that is available offline and blocks that you can create when you are offline. So let's first talk about the features that work offline. And right now, it really kind of boils down to basic use. When you make a page available offline, you're going to be able to view most of the basic content that's on that page. And you can also do a lot of the basic editing that you would normally do when you're online. If you want to create text content, headers, if you want to create lists, toggles, even additional pages, you can do that. You can set uh simple database property values. So things like selects, dates, um numbers, those kinds of properties can be very easily edited. And notion has some pretty sophisticated algorithms going on for uh handling merge conflicts when you go back online, which I'll cover in my follow-up video. And basically, uh you can do most of your basic work if you're say working on a report or working on a video script while you're offline. So, let's talk about some of the stuff that doesn't work offline. AI stuff pretty much doesn't work offline at all. You can't make new AI blocks. You can't regenerate from a prompt in existing AI blocks. You can't do AI meeting notes transcription. You can't really talk to the notion agent. Uh you can't upload files for the most part. You can't share or export pages. You can't use advanced database features. So if you have relation properties that are connecting to other databases, those probably won't work. Rollup properties usually aren't going to work. Um you can't enable or edit advanced database features like sprints or sub items. You can't mess with the my tasks feature that connects to notion home. Some formula properties are not going to work. Uh buttons don't work at all. And if you go to the settings while you're offline, that is also not going to work except for that one singular offline section which would make sense uh to work while offline. Now, in terms of block type support, I'm not going to go through all these. I will quickly scroll through them uh and note a few uh notable exceptions, I suppose. So, as you can see, most text type blocks are going to work just fine. You can create pages while you're offline. Images are interesting. I did notice that when you're offline, you can view images that are on an offline enabled page. You cannot type slashimage to upload an image through the normal uploader. However, if you say take a screenshot with like cleanshot or another screenshot app, you're going to see that default embed box. You're not actually going to see the image itself, but when you go back online, the image will upload to notion servers and then you will see it. Uh the other types of media blocks generally don't work. video, audio, file uploads are not going to work at all. Most database view types do work. However, I did learn that chart views don't work at all. You can't make them. You can't view them. So, I'm guessing that whatever code calculates how charts are going to display is running on the server, not locally. You can't make or fill out forms, which makes sense. Um, and you also can't really use buttons or automations at all. At this point, I want to talk about some best practices for working offline use into your daily workflow. And I want to talk both for personal use and for team use cases. And we'll start with personal use. The main recommendation I have for you if you want to work with notion pages offline is to offline them manually. Go to that three dot menu and toggle the page offline uh manually instead of relying on any of the automatic offlining methods. Also ### Segment 3 (10:00 - 15:00) [10:00] remember that it is a per device setting. So make sure that you are doing it on the device where you want to access the content. And then this recommendation applies both for personal use and for team use. Right now before you go offline, you're going to want to go and actually view the content that you want to work on uh while you're still online. And that is because the notion apps are supposed to do background updating. They are supposed to in the background fetch updates made from other devices or other users in the background and refresh your local devices cache of content. But in my extensive testing for this feature, it wasn't working. And I reported this to the Notion team. They actually acknowledged that it was a bug I uncovered and they told me in the first week after this offline launch, they're going to start addressing this and trying to improve it. But right now, even Notion's official documentation recommends going and manually viewing the pages that you want to work on before you go offline. From here, let's talk about team use cases. And the first thing I want to say is thanks so much for watching this video. If you're working with a team in Notion, I'm guessing that you are one of the few people on your team who likes Notion enough and is enough of a nerd to watch Thomas Frank Explains videos. So that means it likely falls to you to educate the other people on your team about both the best practices that I just covered in the personal use section, which also apply to team use, but also about teamspecific considerations. And the main one that I want to bring up is the potential for merge conflicts. Now, I want to go back to my PC view here because I actually pasted a couple of screenshots uh from some of my tests, and I'm going to cover these a bit more in my nerdy follow-up video here. Uh but the main thing I want to point out here is in any kind of asynchronous collaborative situation where somebody is working on a shared page or a shared resource while they're offline, there is the potential for merge conflicts. And that is just a fact of physics and computers in general. It's not unique to Notion. If you got somebody who's working on a plane and they don't have Wi-Fi, they're working on an independent local copy and everyone else is working on say like the main copy that is still being synced instantaneously. Well, when that person who was offline comes back online, their plane lands, their changes have to be merged into the main copy and there might be conflicting changes there. Now I will say notion has gone to some pretty extreme lengths to make these changes merge really seamlessly but there can be scenarios where somebody has made changes and changes that were made an offline device can overwrite those changes or vice versa. So one thing that I'll note is certain types of edits you're going to make can only exist in one state or another. Like say the background color of a block here. If I made this red on an online device and I made it uh green in a different offline device, the most recent edit based on timestamp, which is stored in the local device and then synced to the server once everything's back online, is going to win. So if somebody on your team had made this read, they might be disappointed to see that their edit is now overwritten by an offline edit that happened later. More interestingly, you can get situations like this where edits to the same piece of text on multiple devices while at least one is offline can cause some pretty interesting merging. Now, one thing that I want to commend the Notion team for is there's actually no way that edits in multiple places can destroy content that was made on another device. And I'll kind of let you read the article if you're interested in this. I'm going to cover it more in my in-depth video. Uh, but the upshot is you can get some weird merge conflicts like I demonstrate here in this screenshot. Um, but you're not going to get merge conflicts where say one device added a bunch of content and another device somehow unwittingly destroys that content. That won't happen. Additionally, if you do run into a merge conflict, remember that there is a page history looking for here. Uh, version history feature in notion on every page. So, if you do run into a weird merge conflict situation, you can always go to version history and you can either restore a previous version or you can at least reference that previous version and maybe copy some content out of it. That being said, if you're in a team use case, maybe let your co-workers know that, hey, I'm going to be on a plane and I'm planning on working on this press release that we're working on for a marketing launch. The last thing I'll note for team use is that any member in your workspace, no matter their permission level on a page, as long as they can view the page, they can make it available offline. Uh, and by contrast, any guests in your workspace cannot make pages available offline, even if they have full access. Now, we have over 40,000 people who have bought my ultimate brain template, which is the exact system I use to run my entire life, as well as over 10,000 people who have my creators companion template, the exact system I use to plan all of my ### Segment 4 (15:00 - 18:00) [15:00] YouTube and social media content. So, a lot of those people are likely to ask in our customer community, are there any special considerations for offline mode in my notion templates or more broadly any notion templates that you might have gotten from anyone? And initially, I thought that the ability to automatically download database pages that are in an offline enabled page was going to uh really have some cool considerations for templates. I thought I might be able to offline my Ultimate Brain homepage and have uh all my most important pages offlined. However, in my testing, like I mentioned before, I kind of found that feature to be a little bit inconsistent. And I really think that we should be just manually offlining pages for the utmost reliability of offline access. What that means is at least for now, I don't think there are any special considerations that you need to make in terms of template use with offline mode and we don't plan to add any special new features to any of our templates because nothing really would make sense at least here at launch. That said, if you are looking for a system to manage your entire life, if you want a better task manager, if you want the best note-taking system for notion, daily planning worksheet that is a dynamic way to help you plan your day and stay on task, seriously, my favorite thing that I've ever built inside of Notion, you can get all of that inside of Ultimate Brain. It is the system that I use to run my entire life. I use it to plan my day. easily capture new notes. I even have a really cool automation that I can use to record my voice and turn it into text notes. I actually practice this video and all of my onstage talks I give at conferences using that automation and all of those transcripts go to my ultimate brain copy and all of that works in a seamless way to help me run my life. It is the most important tool that I use and I built it, poured blood, sweat and tears into it into a template that you can get at thomasjfrank. com/brain. And in addition to the template itself, you get world-class documentation and tutorials. We have hours of video tutorials, text tutorials, basically everything you need to know if you want to set it up, customize it, if you want to change any of the automations we bundle with it. And we also have world-class support, active support from notion experts who answer every single question. So if you get stuck, you can very easily ask a question in our exclusive customer community and you'll get an answer from a notion expert who will get you on your way. Once again, thomasjfrank. com/brain if you want to get your own copy of Ultimate Brain and upgrade your life organization inside of Notion. Now, when I create my follow-up video going into the nerdy details of my testing for this offline mode, I'm going to have that right there. If you are newer to Notion and you want to learn it and become an expert, I think there is no better way than to get your hands dirty. And this video right here will give you a stepbystep guide building with me a really wonderful task manager. You can build it yourself along with me. I'll show you every single step and you'll become a Notion expert and touch a lot of the pieces of Notion. Kind of get your hands dirty with them along the way. Check that out.