Aside from the provided perfectly working solution in base-r, you may want consider the tidyverse package as part of your toolkit:
The tidyverse is a coherent system of packages for data manipulation, exploration and visualization that share a common design philosophy.
For instance, in the following chapter - of the excellent online free R for Data Science book - the select() function is introduced and several approaches of selecting your column variables are described.
This book is definitely worthwhile to get you started.
HTH as well