Hi if you mean you have a text file which you want some numbers of that to be in a column you can use fprint or fopen.
I use this way in my thesis. First i produce input text file with dlmwrite code. Then in another part i just use this code:
FileID = fopen('file_name.txt')
A= textscan(FileID, ' %s %s ' )
fclose(FileID)
celldisp(A)
After this code you should run and see which number is for the x (x is an example that has a value of 2) and you should see which column (x) is located. For example in column 5 and row 9