I never end up doing this right and try on the plane to edit a Google Slide and then discover it is not set for offline. This is really complicated when you get a bunch of different GMail ids for work, home and non-profits. Here’s the decoder ring for how to do this:

  1. For each Google account start up Chrome and create a People/Add Person, this creates a separate identity.
  2. When you get then, make sure to Turn on sync and then login to that Gmail identity. This creates a profile.
  3. Now you have to make sure that the Person always matches the Gmail address, so for every different address, you want a different Person.
  4. Now go to https://google.com/drive and choose Setting and pick Offline access so that it will store them properly.
  5. Then go to the appropriate document viewer (this doesn’t work in Drive). So for instance, you go to google.com.docs and right click on each document and select offline so it will be there. Don’t close the window of anything you want to edit on the plane. This is the mistake I always make.

Now the discipline part, when you are using Google Chrome and Google Drive make sure the identity on the upper right and the identity on Google.com are the same icon. Never log out and log back in to someone else otherwise, the offline stuff won’t work.
If you are dilligent, then you will get window set for each identity and that keeps all the offline stuff working.

I’m Rich & Co.

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