Here's another one from the "I'm not sure I'd have thought of that as a TIP" file. I do today's tip so many times a day I assumed that everyone knew it. But this letter from a patient of mine proves that it's still a tip to some:

> I don't know if you've posted this one yet, but here's a
> trick I discovered to create an alias. Hold down the Cmd &
> Option key while clicking on whatever you want to alias
> and you'll be able to drag an alias off of whatever
> you clicked on. Easy.

I use this technique almost exclusively. I rarely use the File menu's Make Alias command or its keyboard shortcut, Command-L. They make the alias in the same directory (folder) as the parent. That's almost never where I want the alias so I've adopted Command-Option-Drag as my preferred way to make an alias.

Like I said, I'm not sure I'd have thought of that as a "tip," per se, but if you didn't know you could do it, it's one of the most convenient shortcuts in all of Macdom.

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Bob LeVitus is a leading authority on Mac OS and the author of 39 books, including Mac OS X For Dummies and The Little iTunes Book