PowerPoint for Mac cannot import outline — .RTF, .TXT, and .DOCX all greyed out in “Slides from Outline”

Hi, Rachel Zhang

Welcome to Microsoft Q&A forum.

Sorry for this frustrating situation that you're having. On PowerPoint for Mac, “Slides from Outline” is picky about how the outline file is stored and encoded, and it will often reject files that look fine in Word/TextEdit when the converter can’t reliably parse the content. Microsoft also notes that Word files must be closed and, on Mac, the most dependable path is a Word outline saved as Rich Text Format (.rtf) before importing.

Here are some suggestions you can try:

Save as RTF, then fully quit Word before importing

In Word: File > Save As > Rich Text Format (.rtf), then close the document and quit Word (not just close the window). PowerPoint explicitly relies on the outline file being closed, and on Mac it expects the outline to come through RTF rather than a live .docx session.

Round-trip the RTF through TextEdit (re-encode it cleanly)

Open the .rtf in TextEdit, then File > Save (or Save As) to create a fresh RTF copy. This can remove hidden formatting or minor file-structure issues that trigger the “No text converter is installed” message even when the extension is correct.

Move the outline to a simple local folder and rename the file

Put the outline in something like Documents (not a cloud-only location), and rename it to a short name without special characters. Converter errors are frequently tied to “unusual” file paths or temp-style locations, so a plain local path removes that variable.

Rebuild the outline in a brand-new Word document (default styles only)

Create a new blank Word file, paste your content using “Keep Text Only,” then reapply Heading 1 and Heading 2, then Save As RTF again. This works when the original document’s style definitions are subtly corrupted even though headings appear to be applied.

Hope this helps. If you tell me your PowerPoint version (PowerPoint menu > About PowerPoint), I can tailor which of the above is most likely in your build.

Looking forward to your response.

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Please provide the present Version Numbers of both macOS & Office.

A link to a shared copy of the outline RTF would be most useful as long as it contains no confidential info. See these instructions if you need them: Share OneDrive files and folders