How to parse file in shell script?

Hi,

I have a file with 3 columns of data. I would like to write a shell script file to parse the data. How to do that?

#!/bin/sh

cat in_file | while read LINE
do
   echo "$LINE"
   # here I got the line from the file

   # now I want to extract data from column1, column2 and column3

   # I tried the following but it doesn't work
   column1=`awk '{print $1}' $LINE`
   # as it complain $LINE is not a file.
 
   # Any idea? What command should I use?
 
  # do something with the data....

done