Working With Offline Pages
Iain Laskey explains how to access your favourite sites even when offline
A rarely used feature of Internet Explorer (IE) is the ability to keep copies of web pages or even whole web sites offline on your PC. This allows you to browse a site without being connected to the Internet. Better yet, you can have the offline copy automatically updated to reflect the live web site according to whatever schedule you specify. Let's see how it's done.
Choose Your Web Site
The first step is to make sure you have added the site to your favourites. Now Select 'Organize Favorites' from the Favorites menu. Click on the site you wish to keep offline. You'll notice that a tick box appears on the left hand side marked 'Make Available Offline', click on it with your mouse. A tick will appear in the box and a new button labelled 'Properties' will appear. Click on Properties and select the Download tab. Here is where the action is.
The most important option is at the top and by default is marked 'Download pages 0 links deep from this page'. This allows you to just keep a copy of the current page or to instruct IE to navigate down through the various links on the page. As an example, if you changed this to 2 links deep, IE will download the current page, any links from that page and any links from those links. This can quickly add up to a lot of data so you also have the option on limiting the amount of disk space allocated to the site when downloading it to your PC. Be aware though that this will only follow normal links in a site. Any fancy JavaScript or Flash based menus are unlikely to be followed correctly.
If you click on the Advanced button you can specify whether or not images, sounds or ActiveX/Java components are also downloaded. There is also an option to include a logon name and password should the site require it although this may not work for many sites depending on how they prompt for your logon details. If you want to know when/if a page has changed, you can enter your email details and IE will advise you of changes as they happen, which is nice.
Once the above steps are carried out, IE will download the web page or pages as required. These will then be viewable even when your offline. This is handy for reference sites that have a lot of static data that rarely changes.
Scheduling Updates
What if the site you want to keep a copy of keeps changing? No problem. You can tell IE to update them all by selecting Synchronise from the Tools menu. To save having to remember to do this, you can create a schedule to automatically do the updating.
Select 'Organize Favorites' from the Favorites menu and choose the site you want to schedule. Make sure you have 'Make Available Offline' ticked and click on the Properties button. This time choose the Schedule tab. Here you can choose a time to update and how often the update occurs such as once every 3 days. You can also select if you want your PC to connect to the Internet itself for the update if you're not online at the time you schedule. We'd recommend leaving this unticked. You wouldn't want to find your PC had gone online and spent 6 hours downloading twice your data limit for the month! You would have lots to read whilst working out how to pay the bill though.
Removing the Offline Copy
If you decide to get rid of the offline copy, simply deselect the tick box marked 'Make Available Offline'. This will prevent any further updates. To get rid of all the stored data, select 'Internet Options' from the Tools menu then click on 'Delete Files..' in the 'Temporary Internet Files' section. Select 'Delete all Offline Content' and click on OK. IE will then remove all your temporary files including the web page(s) you no longer wish to keep offline.
