This seems like such a trivial thing to do: given a data.frame DF and variables w,v, x,y,z I can do DF["x"] or DF[c("x","y")] if I create a vector, mylist = c("x",y") then I do DF[mylist] I am not getting x and y, I get something else. what is the correct way to subset a data.frame by columns using a vector, as if I were doing DF["x","y"]? Peter