textread to save specific columns?

My professor wants us to textread to read specific columns, it is a matrix with 12 rows, 4 columns. However I do not know how to read specific values.

[Bob Thompson]

Most likely the best strategy is to read the entire thing and then store the values that you want. Suppose you have six columns of doubles and you want only the third one.

[~,~,C,~,~,~] = textread('myfile.txt','%d %d %d %d %d %d %d',N);

Where N is the number of rows.