Google today has announced the roll out of a much anticipated feature for the online Google Docs - bringing them offline. Starting today a select group of individuals that have Google Gears will be able to save their online Google documents and have them available offline as well.

The online Google tools currently provide a great convenience with things like Gmail, calendars and online documents with centrally located storage that can be accessed from almost any browser with an internet connection. One of the downsides is that as soon as the internet connection is lost, so are the documents, email, etc. With this new feature, the documents will still be available through the browser when the internet connection is lost and it will continue to save changes, syncing up with the online storage the next time a connection is available.

The new offline Google docs will be rolling out to everyone over the next few weeks and for now is limited to just word processing documents. The word processing tool will also be a scaled down version when used offline and initially will only be available in English.

Google Docs Blog