http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/stories/solutions/0,8224,2505145,00.html Working Off-Line in IE Why and how you can browse the Web without being connected. By Neil Randall — May 2, 2000 Step 1: With the desired page showing, select Favorites | Add to Favorites to display the Add Favorite dialog, then click the Make available offline check box. Click the Customize button to launch the Offline Favorite wizard. Step 2: After an introduction screen, the wizard asks whether you want only the current page available off-line or all the pages hyperlinked from it, up to three levels deep Step 3: Next, you decide when you want IE to download the pages, either according to a customizable schedule or whenever you select Tools | Synchronize. Step 4: The last dialog of the wizard gives you a chance to enter your user name and password for the site, if required. When you're finished, you're back at the Add Favorite dialog. Give the new off- line site Favorite a name and location. Step 5: For further customization, click on Organize Favorites from the Favorites menu. On this dialog, find the page you want to customize in the list on the right and select it. Under the Make available offline check box (which will be checked), click Properties. Step 6: The Download tab is where you control synchronization. You can specify up to three levels of links (as in the wizard) but you can also tell IE not to follow external links and to limit hard disk usage. Step 7: The Advanced button brings you this dialog, where you can specify what types of content should be downloaded. Step 8: Once you've customized the pages for which you want off-line access, synchronize them through Tools | Synchronize. After synchronizing, you're ready to unplug and browse off-line. No, this isn't about doing away with your Internet connection to increase productivity. Instead, this is about using the often-ignored Work Offline feature included in recent versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer. The feature is also found in recent versions of Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express, and we'll consider these briefly as well. But mostly, we'll discuss how to set up a Web site for off-line browsing. Why work off-line? Most Web users have dial-up accounts with unlimited access to the Internet, and increasing numbers have 24/7 access through always-on cable or DSL service. The Net's ready any time we are, so why would anyone want to work off-line? Working off-line has a number of very real benefits. Here are a few cases in which it would benefit you: 1. You pay for access by the hour or minute (on the plane, for instance), or you subscribe to a limited access plan, and you want to perform your Internet tasks with as little online time as possible. By working off-line, you connect to your ISP and download your messages and Web sites. You can then disconnect and read your e-mail and downloaded Web sites at your leisure, without the meter running. If Outlook or Outlook Express is configured to send and receive messages automatically, you'll have to reconfigure each time you're off-line to avoid connection errors. Turning on the Work Offline feature stops the mailer from sending and checking for mail, and also from doing so when you click the Send or Send/Receive button. Instead, the mailer puts the messages you want to send in the out-box, waiting for you to leave off-line mode. 2. You're scheduled to give a presentation to an important audience and everything must go smoothly. The problem is that your presentation depends on having access to the Web so that you can show a variety of Web sites and discuss their features and content. You've been promised an Ethernet-based Internet connection, but even if the connection actually works on the day in question, you're at the mercy of its speed. Use the Work Offline feature to download the sites to your notebook so you can display them as if you were on the Web, without using the Net connection at all. 3. Same scenario as the previous, but this time you need the Web sites as they appear when you're creating the presentation, not as they might appear the day you actually make the presentation. If the sites were to change, you'd have to reformulate the presentation on the fly. Again, use Work Offline to download the sites and eliminate the uncertainty. 4. For discussion or instruction purposes, you want to distribute copies of Web sites to users who do not have Net connections. Download the sites using Work Offline and then copy the files to floppy disks or burn them onto CD-R disks. Making Off-line work for you So how do you make it happen? Implementing the Work Offline feature is easy. Just select Work Offline from the File menu. The challenge lies in setting up precisely what you want to make available. For your e- mail, the process is simple: Download your mail and read and compose as you wish. But when you want to make Web sites available off-line, there are two major choices: You can simply save a Web page's content for off-line use, or you can take full advantage of IE's off-line working features. Saving Web Pages The first major option is to save the document currently displayed in IE to your hard disk. (This has nothing to do with the Work Offline feature, al though it's important for actually doing work off- line.) In Internet Explorer (and Netscape Navigator, too), you can save the current page in two formats: as a text file, which captures the text but none of the graphics and none of the page formatting, or as HTML code, which captures text and HTML formatting but not graphics. Both are useful, but they are limited in two important ways. First, graphics account for an increasing portion of Web content, so much of the page is lost if you don't include them. The other limitation is that only one page of a Web site is captured using these options, and you'll often need more. You can, of course, navigate to different pages of the Web and save them one by one, but then they aren't likely to be linked to one another. IE4 offers a third Save option, and IE5 adds yet another. The third option is Save as Web Page, a choice that solves the first limitation mentioned above by capturing both the HTML code and the related graphics files. This option stores the graphics in a separately created folder, and they remain linked to the main document. When you view the document off-line, you'll see the graphics in place as if you were connected to the Web. IE5's additional choice is to save the file as a Web archive file with an MHT extension. This choice stores the file as a single document, embedding the graphics rather than storing them in a separate folder. The purpose of the file is to provide easy archiving of entire Web pages without the need for links that retrieve the graphics files. An MHT file is ideal for sending a Web page as an attachment to an e- mail message, because you need only send one file. And if you need editing capability, Microsoft's Office Update provides a Word 2000 converter for MHT files. To save files in MHT format at all, however, you must have Outlook Express 5 already installed (see support.microsoft.com/support /kb/articles/q198/0/61.asp). Note that you cannot view Web archive files on the Active Desktop. The Work Offline features The second way to work with the Web without being online is to use IE's Work Offline, Make Available Offline, and Synchronize features. You'll find the first in the File menu, the second in the Favorites dialog boxes (Favorites | Add to Favorites, or Favorites | Organize Favorites), and the third in the Tools menu. The opening step-by-step illustration in this article takes you through the process of making a Web site available for off-line browsing. We'll just add a few remarks here about how much to download. When choosing how many levels of links to save for off-line viewing, keep in mind that you may end up downloading a huge number of documents, so be careful when making this choice. By selecting a one- link depth, you download the current page plus the Web documents linked directly to that page. If you select two levels deep, you get the current page, the documents linked to the current page, and the documents linked to those pages, even if the links are to external sites. Using the Download tab of the Properties dialog box mentioned in Step 5, you can tell the feature to ignore external links. By doing so, you get all the pages x many levels deep on that site, but not outside the site. This is obviously a much smaller (and probably more useful) selection. And then? Once you've synchronized your off-line Web site, disconnect from the Internet and choose its corresponding Favorite entry in your browser. You'll see the site's main page, and you can click as many levels deep as you selected in your customization. If anyone asks how you're doing that without being online, tell them you have a really expensive space-shuttle-based connection that's still in early prototyping but was made available by invitation only from the Russian and American space agencies. They'll be suitably impressed.