Once you have read data into R using table.read() as described here , you can also access each of the cells in the 9 element grid of the 3 columns X 3 rows by providing row and column numbers. You defined the table as shown here: You can access row1, column 1 using this code: ----------- > df[1, "Col1"] [1] A ----------- Using code similar to the above you can access each element providing row number and column number as shown. df[1, Col1] df[1, "Col2"] df[1, "Col3"] df[2, Col1] df[2, "Col2"] df[2, "Col3"] df[3, Col1] df[3, "Col2"] df[3, "Col3"]