Once Gears is installed, Docs will synchronize your documents between its servers and your browser. I found synching to be pretty quick -- 192 documents took only about two and a half minutes to synch on my office connection. Once you're set up, you can access docs.google.com in your browser even if you're offline. You can make changes to existing documents and, once you reconnect to Google's servers, those changes will be saved to the original document