I recently tweeted about my new article that showed how you can import an outline you create in TextEdit on Mac OS X straight into PowerPoint to create your slides quickly and easily — soon I received a tweet response from Joel Heffner who could not make this happen. To cut a long story short, we found that this happened because PowerPoint cannot work with outlines that are encoded as Unicode (UTF-16).
What you need to do is choose TextEdit | Preferences — and then select the Open and Save tab shown in Figure 1, shown below.
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Figure 1: TextEdit Preferences
Make sure you choose Unicode (UTF-8) or Western (Mac OS Roman) — and then create your outline using this link: Creating PowerPoint Outlines in TextEdit — Mac. Other encoding options may also work — but Unicode (UTF-16) does not!