OneDrive Adds an Offline Mode for Work and School Accounts

Microsoft has started rolling out new offline capabilities in the OneDrive web app for work and school accounts. The new Offline mode comes after Microsoft redesigned the OneDrive web app in January, and it also lets users perform some actions that until now required File Explorer on Windows and Finder on macOS.

When using OneDrive on the web in Offline mode, users with a work or school account can browse their files, rename them and/or move them, and all changes will be synced locally when an Internet connection is reestablished. It’s also possible to open Office and non-Office files that have been marked as “available offline” in their native app, and again, all changes made on them will be uploaded after reconnecting to the Internet.

The web app also integrates with the OneDrive Files On-Demand feature, with all changes being synced locally through the OneDrive sync client. “When you are online and working with your files in OneDrive for web, you can now select files to always be always available on your computer. Conversely, if you want to free up space on your computer, you can now easily mark offline files to be online-only,” the OneDrive team explained.

Making some files available offline from the OneDrive web app will also speed up loading times when users have an Internet connection. That’s because the web app will be using users’ local cache to access their content faster.

“By accessing your content from your local cache instead of fetching it from a cloud server, data retrieval speeds are significantly improved,” the OneDrive team explained. “The result? A smooth OneDrive experience that’s insulated against slow or intermittent connections. Furthermore, this enhancement has the added advantage of bypassing cloud service-related throttling issues.

Offline mode in the OneDrive web app will roll out gradually to users with work and school accounts. The feature currently only supports Chromium-based browsers, and there’s a per-device setting to enable or disable it in the upper right corner of the page. You can learn more information about how to get started on this support page.