Trying to get somewhere in a hurry? The folks at Apple figured this might happen, so they built a very neat feature into OS X Lion to help you see a map of any address you’ve been sent via email, or encounter in a web page or document. No copying and pasting required.

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Here’s another tip from Mac Kung Fu, which contains over 300 tips, tricks, hints and hacks for OS X. It’s available from Amazon as well as other bookstores, and also as an eBook for all eReaders.

If you see a mailing address in a web page, simply highlight all of it, then right-click the highlight. Then click Show Address in Google Maps. This will open a new tab in Safari showing the address. This works not only in Safari but also Google Chrome, although not in Mozilla Firefox.

If the address is in a Mail message, hovering the mouse cursor over it should reveal an arrow icon that, when clicked, will show a menu offering a Show Address in Google Maps option.

You can also look up any address that you see in a document being viewed in TextEdit–highlight it, then right-click it, as described above. You can even type the address yourself then do this—maybe not the quickest way of mapping an address but perhaps useful if you don’t already have a browser window open!

It’s not clear how OS X detects that it’s an address, but my best guess is that it detects the inclusion of a zip code (or postal code, in other countries). Therefore, don’t forget to highlight all of the zip code when initially selecting the text.

Bonus tip: Try highlighting a telephone number in the same way in a Mail message or within a TextEdit document, then right-click the highlight and select the Large Type option on the menu that appears. Cool, no?