Searches inside your files
Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, OpenDocument, RTF, emails and their attachments, ZIP, 7z, RAR and tar archives, notes, data files and source code — all searched by what they say.
Desktop search for Windows
Find the words.
Find the file.
CherryQuery searches inside your Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, email, archive and text files for a keyword — and now reads scanned PDFs and images too. Every match shows the file name, when it was last modified, and a preview with your keyword highlighted.
Your documents stay on your computer.
Remember a phrase, not the file name?
CherryQuery looks through what’s written in your documents, so you can find the right file even when you’ve forgotten what you called it.
See the match in context
Each result shows the file name, last modified date and time, and a content preview with your keyword highlighted.
Precise when you need it
Put a phrase in "quotes" to match whole words, and combine terms with AND, OR and NOT.
One shortcut away
Press Ctrl + Shift + Space from anywhere to open CherryQuery, or pick your own hotkey. It waits quietly in the taskbar.
Fast, gentle indexing
A local index makes searches quick. Files changed in the last 7 days are indexed first; older files wait until your computer is idle.
Private by design
No uploads, no accounts, no analytics, telemetry or ads. Light and dark themes, and an interface in nine languages.
New: text recognition (OCR)
Scans and photos are searchable, too.
A scanned contract, a photographed receipt, a screenshot of a slide — CherryQuery reads the text in them with built-in text recognition (OCR) that runs on your PC, so they turn up in your search just like any other document.
- Scanned PDFs and images, including every page of a multi-page TIFF.
- Each result shows a thumbnail of the spot on the page where your keyword was found, highlighted.
- Runs entirely on your PC — no cloud service, nothing uploaded.
- Scanned PDFs that were skipped before are indexed again automatically.
- .png
- .jpg
- .jpeg
- .tif
- .tiff
OCR always reads English, plus the languages you pick in Settings: the app languages are built in, and 100+ more are downloaded once when you add them. Up to 50 pages are read from each scanned PDF or TIFF.
Works with the files you already have
From reports and spreadsheets to notes, config files and code.
Documents
- .docx
- .xlsx
- .pptx
- .odt
- .ods
- .odp
- .rtf
Email and archives New
- .eml
- .msg
- .zip
- .7z
- .rar
- .tar
- .tgz
- .gz
The subject, sender, recipients and body of .eml and Outlook .msg emails are searched. Attachment names are searched too, and so is attachment content when the attachment’s extension is in your indexed list. Files inside ZIP, 7z, RAR and tar archives are searched the same way.
Text and notes
- .txt
- .md
- .markdown
- .log
Data and config
- .csv
- .tsv
- .json
- .xml
- .yaml
- .yml
- .ini
- .cfg
- .conf
- .toml
- .properties
Web and source code
- .html
- .htm
- .css
- .js
- .jsx
- .ts
- .tsx
- .py
- .java
- .c
- .cpp
- .h
- .cs
- .go
- .rs
- .rb
- .sql
- .sh
- .ps1
- .bat
Scanned PDFs and images are read with text recognition. Older .doc, .xls and .ppt files aren’t supported.
Your document stay on your computer.
CherryQuery reads and indexes your files right on your PC. Nothing about your files, your searches or your index is sent anywhere.
- Files and their contents are never uploaded.
- No analytics, telemetry, advertising or crash reporting.
- Remove all indexed content any time with Clear Index.
Good to know
A few details about what CherryQuery searches and how.
Which folders are searched?
Your Documents folder by default. Folders like node_modules, .git, .svn, $Recycle.Bin and System Volume Information are skipped, as are Office’s temporary ~$ files. You can adjust indexed file types and excluded folders in Settings.
How quickly do new or changed files show up?
Search reads a local index rather than the files themselves, so new or changed files appear once they’re indexed. Recently changed files go first. and the folder is re-checked every 10 minutes while the app is open.
Are there size limits?
Documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, OpenDocument, RTF), emails and archives up to 50 MB and text files up to 5 MB are searched; larger files are skipped. Up to 2 million characters of text are indexed per file.
How are emails and archives searched?
For .eml and Outlook .msg files, the subject, sender, recipients and message body are searched. Attachment names are searched too, and so is attachment content when the attachment’s extension is in your indexed list. ZIP, 7z, RAR (versions 4 and 5) and tar archives — including .tgz and .tar.gz — work the same way: the names of the files inside are always searched, and their content is searched when their extension is in your indexed list. A .gz file that isn’t a tar archive, such as report.txt.gz, is searched as the file it contains. Attachments and archive files must also be within the maximum file size. Emails and archives inside each other are opened up to 3 levels deep, and up to 1,000 files are read from each archive. A match opens the email or archive, not the attachment or file inside it. Encrypted ZIP archives, and ZIP archives that use recompression other than Deflate, can’t be read — only the names of the files inside are searched. Encrypted files inside 7z and RAR archives archives are searched by name only.
Can it read scanned or password-protected files?
Yes. Scanned PDFs and images (.png, .jpg, .tif) are read with built-in text recognition (OCR), right on your PC — nothing is uploaded. Password-protected documents can’t be read.
How does matching work?
Matching is case-insensitive by default. Use double quotes for whole-word matches — "cat" matches “cat” but not “category” — and combine words with AND, OR and NOT. Text files are read as UTF-8.
Ready to find that file?
Get CherryQuery for Windows from the Microsoft Store and search your documents in seconds.
Get it fromMicrosoft Store