Helpful Tips!
20 March 2002 By Actrix Networks
Is there a website on the Internet that you visit frequently? If so, you may find it convenient to save that page onto your hard drive. By doing that, you can load the page in Internet Explorer without having to go online. Now, of course, this won’t be a great help for say, an interactive banking page where you need to be online in order to interact with your accounts in real time, and it will mean that your web page will only be as up-to-date as it was at the time you saved it.
However, saving a page offline certainly has its uses. Perhaps you’ve found a site that has a long story on it, or a lot if information that you may not have time for when you first visit. By saving the page to your hard drive, you can bring it up again and read it at your leisure without having to spend time (and money) being online. Perhaps the Actrix newsletters themselves are an example you might want to experiment with.
Saving a web page to your hard drive is pretty easy. The simplest way is just to visit a page, and once it’s fully loaded click the File menu and then Save As… This will bring up a Save Web Page box which you can use to select a name for the saved page and a location on your hard drive in which to save it (e.g. My Documents or Desktop).
Under Save as Type I’d suggest selecting the Web Page Complete option, though you can also select other options such as saving the text (html) only if you don’t care about the pictures. Leave the Encoding box alone and just simply accept whatever Windows decides to put there. Click the Save button and the page will be saved on your hard drive at the location you specified. Perhaps the simplest thing to do here would be to save the page to your desk top. That way it will be easy to find and open. To do this, make sure you click the Desktop icon (pictured above on the left of the box, though other versions of Windows might have this icon appearing near the top right of the box) before you click Save.
A More Complicated and More Powerful Way
A more powerful way of saving web pages offline uses the Bookmarks feature.
To save a web page for viewing offline:
Visit the page you want to save, and wait for it to fully load.
Click Favorites on the Menu bar, and then Add to Favorites. An Add Favorite box will pop up.
Feel free to edit the name of the Bookmark, and to select the Links folder for saving, if you think that’s a good idea. (You may need to click the Create In button to get the folder list to display)
Make sure there is a tick in the Make Available Offline tickbox, and click OK.
And there you have it. Next time you want the page and you’re offline, just open Internet Explorer, click the bookmark you made for it, either under your Favorites menu, or on your Links bar (depending on how you’ve chosen to save the bookmark). Your computer may prompt you to go online, but if you click the Work Offline button Internet Explorer will load for you the version saved on your hard drive without you having to go online at all.