Selecting multiple 'cells'

[martin booth]

For the project I am doing as part of language revision, I'm using  
the outliner as a spreadhseet.
I want to be able to pick certain cells, for instance;
in the first column I have a list of words, I want to select a  
portion of those words, without selecting the whole column, or the  
whole row of each.

How is this possible? there seems to be no help.

Thanks for any help, hope it makes sense.

-MBN