Both the Official Google Blog and the Official Google Docs Blog announced that they have started rolling out offline Google Docs to “a small percentage of users” and all users should have it in the “next few weeks”. In the short video above, Google Docs product manager Ken Norton briefly demonstrates how Google Docs offline works.

As I (and many others) have predicted, the offline function is backed by Google Gears - “an open source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline.” The only other Google online application that uses Gears right now is Google Reader, but Google Calendar will soon follow, and possibly Gmail as well.

When editing documents offline, the documents will saved locally on your computer, and once you get back online again, the local copy will update the online version by syncing the the copy on your computer to Google Docs.

It’s still a few hours away from April 1st here in the U.S., so I don’t think this is the annual Google April Fool’s prank. :)