Although this has been solved in numerous ways, there is one more solution 
that might work if all the data are formatted with exactly three digits 
followed by a space and two digits. It's something I use all the time with 
fixed-width column data, and it's particularly quick, especially if you are 
dealing with a column in the middle of many columns.

Let me expound upon the example slightly.

123 56
444 28
232 41
413 82
313 43
789 01

With a list like this you can put your cursor at the top left and click. Do 
not select the row. Then, (on the Mac), hold down the shift and the option 
key and click immediately to teh right of the 9 (In 789). Instead of 
highlighting all characters, all rows, you are just highlighting the exact 
18 characters you want for "column 1." You can then copy or cut and do the 
same thing with column 2.

For a PC, I don't know the exact combination, but I would think it work 
similarly with Shift and Alt or something like that.

NOTE: if you have wide lines, and soft-wrap text is turned on and you have 
wrapping line, this won't work since it would give unintended results.

I use this all the time. It's a super-fast way to extract a delimited 
column of text from a bunch of rows without having to write a regex or use 
awk. It's just a way to invoke copy and paste interstitially!

-John



On Thursday, June 30, 2022 at 5:06:09 AM UTC-4 Kaveh wrote:

> David, Extract is a great feature. Simple but clever. I use it all the 
> time for quickly analysing text I have scraped for example...
>
> On Thu, 30 Jun 2022 at 05:18, David Brostoff <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> On Jun 29, 2022, at 8:52 PM, Christopher Waterman <[email protected]> 
>> wrote:
>> > 
>> > Well… No, no more steps.
>>
>> Mystery solved:
>>
>> I somehow had the Regex command highlighted in the Find box. As soon as I 
>> clicked elsewhere to dismiss the highlighting, the extracted text appeared 
>> in the new document.
>>
>> Thanks again -- I really appreciate your help.
>>
>> David
>>
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> Kaveh Bazargan PhD
> Director
> River Valley Technologies <http://rivervalley.io> ● Twitter 
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