Microsoft rolls out offline support for OneDrive on the web for work and school customers

If you use Microsoft 365 for your work or with an education plan, there's a new feature in OneDrive that should be of interest. Microsoft has revealed it is rolling out offline support for OneDrive on the web so that users can access their files on the cloud storage service without an internet connection.

In a blog post, Microsoft stated the features that will be available for OneDrive web users in offline mode without an internet connection:

• Open and interact with OneDrive’s “Home,” “My files,” “Shared,” “Favorites,” “People,” and, “Meeting” views.
• View your folders, file names, and metadata such as file owner, size, recent activity, last open date, and more.
• Use the “My files” view of OneDrive for web to rename, sort, move, or copy files and have those changes sync to your OneDrive when you reestablish an internet connection.
• Open locally stored Office and non-Office files (files marked as “available offline”) in their native app and make and save edit

In addition, if you do have an online connection while using OneDrive, the new offline mode can still be useful:

• You can designate files or folders as available for offline access directly from OneDrive for web.
• You can free up local storage space by making your local files or folders online only directly from OneDrive for web.
• You will experience up to 3X faster loading times when viewing and interacting with your files in OneDrive in your browser and in the OneDrive app in Microsoft Teams and Outlook.

The new features work with your local onboard storage on your PC to store info like file names, sizes, the authors of the files, and more. To access the new mode, your Windows or Mac PC will need to have the OneDrive Sync app installed. Then all you have to do is log into the OneDrive web app and there should be a one-time setup to get it ready for the offline mode.

In addition, the OneDrive Files On-Demand feature can now work with the web edition. Microsoft says this now allows users to set up OneDrive files that will always be available offline on the PC. It can also be used to set up files to make them available only online.

Microsoft recently revamped OneDrive with a new 3.0 edition with features designed to make it easier for users to file the files they need. In May, Microsoft plans to add support for using Copilot on the web version of OneDrive.