Recently I came across a similar situation where I had to read numbers from a text file containing four columns, the first column was the name of thirty six each of three different elements, Cu, N and C. The other three columns were their position coordinates.
What I did is the following: In the MATLAB command window I first declared some values, Cu=29, N=7 and C=6.
Then I highlighted the contents of the text file and in the MATLAB command window gave the line var = [ CtrlV ] and entered.
Now I got a variable called var which is a four column array of which I wanted the last three columns for my further analysis. It was easy.
May be, this or a similar trick will help you.
