Unlike in Windows, the Option/Alt (⌥) key on Macs is not used for the sole purpose of Ctrl+Alt+Del (although that’s a pretty important function when it comes to the PC). The Option key, along with the Command (⌘) key, plays a vital role in keyboarding your way through Mac OS X. Here are ten uses that you might not have known about.

1. Instantly download files/links: A perfect scenario would be if you come across a web page with, say, ten parts to the story. Instead of loading each part in a separate tab and then saving it, just press Option and click on each link. You can get all of those pages in your downloads folder with minimal clicking. Your Mighty Mouse will thank you.

2. Finder—Copy instead of move: When you drag a file from one folder to another on the same partition, it moves the file instead of copying it. If you press Option while dragging the file (get used to dragging-and-dropping instead of right-clicking), however, the cursor will show a plus sign, which means that it will make a copy of the file in the new location instead of moving it. And when you’re dragging files across partitions, holding the Command key before dropping it will move the file instead of copying it.

3. Finder—Close window on opening file: Many a times you might launch a Finder window only to open one file. So once you locate the file, instead of launching it the normal way and then closing the window, press Option and double-click on the file. It will be launched and the window will simultaneously be closed. In this case though, I also recommend a neat little tool called Spotlight. Comes built in with Mac OS X and resides in the top right corner of your screen—you might’ve noticed it, it looks like a little magnifying glass. Trust me, it’s pretty useful.

4. Hide an application: If you are done with one application but don’t want to close all its open windows, the usual shortcut is CommandH for hiding. However, if you press Option and click on another application window or any icon in the Dock, it hides the current application while giving focus to the next one. It’s very handy when you have a ton of Photoshop windows open and you want to temporarily get rid of the clutter.

5. Drag out text in blocks: Every once in a while you come across a PDF document which has a lot of columns, much like a newspaper. If you try to select each column, it doesn’t usually realise its boundaries and selects all the text in adjacent columns with it. So to select just one block of text, press Option and drag a selection around the text block(s) you need. This works with most Cocoa applications but has been redacted from Safari since version 3.

6. Quick Look: One of the best features of Leopard is Quick look, where you just press the spacebar and it shows a preview of the document. What you might not have known is that you can select a whole bunch of pictures and press and hold Option while clicking on the Quick Look icon. This directly springs out a slideshow of the pictures. Not only that, if you press Option and click on any image while in Quick Look, it will zoom into the image, a feature lacking in Preview. Command-Option-Click to zoom out.

7. Slow scrolling: If you come across one of those extremely long web pages or a PDF where the scrollbar becomes really tiny, you can slow down the scrolling speed by pressing Option while dragging the scrollbar. Remember to release the mouse before you release the Option or it will jump way ahead of where you wanted it to stop.

8. Close/minimise all windows: If you press Option and click on the Close/Minimise window button, it will close/minimise all windows of that particular application. It’s useful when you have a bunch of Photoshop documents you don’t know what to do about. Of course, the keyboard shortcut Command-Option-W (or Command-Option-M for minimise) is a better way to close all windows of an application.

9. iPhoto: You may have noticed that iPhoto only has a single sided rotate image button. So if you need to rotate an image left, you might have to click that image rotate button three times to achieve that result. However, hold down the Option key and you’ll see magic happen.

10. Working with text: Pressing Option in conjugation with the left and right direction keys moves the cursor word by word and pressing Shift while you are at it selects those words as well. The up and down direction keys, when pressed with Option held down, make the cursor jump to the beginning and end of every paragraph—very handy while editing HTML in a text editor. Again, use Shift to select paragraphs as you go.

So there you have it, some of the tiny but timesaving ways you can put the Option key to use. For more information about Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts, you can pay a visit to this Apple Knowledge Base article or, better yet, Dan Rodney’s comprehensive and timeless guide on the same subject. Happy keyboarding!