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You create your own categories for data in Formation. This month's entrant in the digital organization derby is Radical Breeze's $30 Formation , currently available for both Mac and Windows. It's like a modular closet system: If you're the type of person who hangs your keys on a row of hooks rather than tossing them on the coffee table, Formation might interest you.

Starting with the preformatted sample set of data types, including to-dos, contacts, and passwords, you can create information storage that suits you perfectly. However, Formation works better for things like frequent-flier numbers than for large amounts of text, such as research for a master's thesis.

For one thing, getting large amounts of text into Formation isn't easy: I couldn't make file importing work with any file type, including plain text. Creating a new record and cutting and pasting, or dragging and dropping, is the only way to get preexisting text into the app.

URLs can be dragged and dropped into a list, and they are live links; you can use them to visit the site in your browser. (Note that you have to click an arrow next to the URL; you don't click on the URL itself.) Likewise, e-mail addresses can be used to open your mail client with a new message window. If you put your mail server information into the preferences, you can e-mail items directly from within Formation.

Once you've created a document, you can't put images into it, which is a pretty big hole. People expect to be able to incorporate graphics into any document, and Formation doesn't even come up to the capabilities of Mac TextEdit on this score. It does have a Media Browser tool that views images and plays audio files, but this is an awkward, unsatisfactory workaround.

Formation also has a calendar, but you can't use it to set up appointments--about its only use is for checking dates--nor does it currently integrate with ICal, the full calendaring program that comes with Mac OS X.

Formation is more like a rough draft than a finished product, but shareware developer Radical Breeze says that it is undergoing a major upgrade that will add quite a few features. The new version will be released for Linux as well as Mac and Windows, the developer says, but it is not predicting at this time when the upgrade will be available.

Though it currently has serious shortcomings as a productivity tool, Formation is fun to play with--if setting up and rearranging filing systems is your idea of fun. The unregistered version can be used indefinitely but limits the number of records you can create.