Any Windows offline note taker apps that allows to import MS Office (msg, docx, xlsx) and pdf files and search within them?

Posted by dan7000
Oct 22, 2015 at 08:35 PM

Yes, programs that highlight search hits n various document types are rare in the desktop software world. Law firms use that type of software all the time to review documents, but most of the types used by law firms are hosted or at least network-based and of course really expensive. One of the simplest—which maybe could run on a local desktop - is called Concordance.

But try Qiqqa. It is made to host documents online but when you download the client it lets you use one “local library” of documents. If you just use that one and delete the cloud-based libraries it never goes online, as far as I can tell. It stores, indexes and searches all types of documents, and lets you add annotations to documents and tag both documents and annotations. Unfortunately with a library of about .5 GB of PDFs it started getting to slow to use at all on my machine, so I stopped using it.

Now that I understand what you are looking for I totally agree: this is a gap in the available software that is prime for someone to fill. Software that can search and show search hits in a native-looking preview of the document, plus allow notes and tags, is way overpriced—and yet it does hardly more than what Evernote does. Time for some disruption in that market.