If you know how many columns you want, then you can simply assign them in code like this:
>> A = [1,2;3,4;5,6];
>> X1 = A(:,1);
>> X2 = A(:,2);
If you have many columns, or an unknown sized matrix, then you can split it up using num2cell with the second optional argument:
>> B = num2cell(A,1);
>> B{1}
ans =
1
3
5
>> B{2}
ans =
2
4
6
Accessing the contents of the cell array is simple and efficient using indexing:
Accessing dynamically named variables like x1, x2, x3, etc. is not recommended, because it forces you into writing slow, complex, obfuscated, buggy code that is hard to debug. Read this to know why:
