How to access single elements in a table in R

Try

data[1, "V1"]  # Row first, quoted column name second, and case does matter

Further note: Terminology in discussing R can be crucial and sometimes tricky. Using the term "table" to refer to that structure leaves open the possibility that it was either a 'table'-classed, or a 'matrix'-classed, or a 'data.frame'-classed object. The answer above would succeed with any of them, while @BenBolker's suggestion below would only succeed with a 'data.frame'-classed object.

There is a ton of free introductory material for beginners in R: CRAN: Contributed Documentation

?"[" pretty much covers the various ways of accessing elements of things.

Under usage it lists these:

x[i]
x[i, j, ... , drop = TRUE]
x[[i, exact = TRUE]]
x[[i, j, ..., exact = TRUE]]
x$name
getElement(object, name)

x[i] <- value
x[i, j, ...] <- value
x[[i]] <- value
x$i <- value

The second item is sufficient for your purpose

Under Arguments it points out that with [ the arguments i and j can be numeric, character or logical

So these work:

data[1,1]
data[1,"V1"]

As does this:

data$V1[1]

and keeping in mind a data frame is a list of vectors:

data[[1]][1]
data[["V1"]][1]

will also both work.

So that's a few things to be going on with. I suggest you type in the examples at the bottom of the help page one line at a time (yes, actually type the whole thing in one line at a time and see what they all do, you'll pick up stuff very quickly and the typing rather than copypasting is an important part of helping to commit it to memory.)