I know that the best answer is to go with either a tabular or array environment depending on which is used most often and change the cell manually when the other environment is needed. This question is more out of curiosity about the capabilities of Latex in this regard more than trying to solve any issue.
If I have a table with four columns and I want only the first column to be in math mode, is there any way to build this into the table properties rather than putting each cell in column 1 in math mode?