Importing Point Cloud Data - then Creating a Surface

Right, so I'm a complete rookie Matlab user - requiring an answer to this question in the simplest terms possible! I've been looking through the help documentation and can't really find the right place to start.

For a geography project, I have scanned a sample with a laser scanner, and received a point cloud of the sample, in a single text file, with rows of x,y, and z co-ordinates (Roughly 400,000 points). I would like to import this text file into Matlab, and create a surface map (or mesh grid - unsure of the terminology here) of the sample.

In another thread slightly related to this one, I saw a user recommend the surf function, but this requires separating the variables for X,Y, and Z, and I'm unsure how to do this from my text file.

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated!