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You pick up the phone to make a business call and think, "Hmm, is it too late to call Chicago?" Or as you set out to send a belated birthday card to Auntie Em, you realize you don't remember the zip code. Instead of digging out the phone book, leafing over to the time zone map, or calling the post office--try Zip Express 2000 from Insight Software Solutions. This free, downloadable utility offers quick and easy access to all U.S. zip codes and their associated cities, states, counties, area codes, and time zones. It even gives you the current time at the location in question.

The U.S. Postal Service's Web site offers free lookups of specific zip+4 codes and city zip codes, but it requires that you know a full mailing address. Zip Express 2000 goes a step further, doing the guesswork and searching for you--and you can search by parts of a zip code, area code, city, county, or state name. The utility can also be programmed with hot keys to paste zip code information directly into Windows applications.

The company provides most Zip Express services on its Getzips.com site, which allows you to search by zip code, county, city, or area code, but it lacks time zones and current times--and you can't customize your searches as you can with the stand-alone product. I tried both the software and the Web-based service and found them to be handy additions to my system tray and my Web browser bookmarks list. Bulk-mail list managers will find Zip Express short on advanced features, however, and its inability to deal with street addresses is a major stumbling block.

Go With What You Know

Zip Express's best feature is its ability to work with incomplete information. If you have only a fragment of the city, county, state, area code, or zip code, Zip Express will display all the possibilities for you.

For example, I tried the Zip Code option and typed in "94." Zip Express immediately displayed a list of all the cities in California where zip codes start with "94." As I added zip digits, the utility zeroed in on the towns that use them. It even started including counties, area codes, time zones, and current times. (You can specify all the information you want to see under Preferences.)

Suppose you want to search by city, and you're not sure of the spelling. Just type in what you know. Enter "Oak," for example, and Zip Express will find every Oakland, Oakley, Oakville, and Oak Park in the country.

Zip Express goes a few steps beyond simple searching. The utility lets you copy and paste information retrieved by a search into any Windows application or clipboard, or send the info directly to your printer. You can also program hot keys that tell Zip Express to enter information into another open application automatically. For example, as you're editing a Word document, you could use your hot key command to call up a Zip Express dialog box asking for a zip code; once you enter it, the program pastes the corresponding city and state into your document.

Customizable templates let you control how the information appears in your application--you could specify one template to copy just an area code, and another to copy a city name, insert a comma, and append the corresponding two-letter state abbreviation and zip code. You could also use the templates to save time updating a database by separating each type of location datum into fields that correspond to fields in your database.