I was fooling with this lately to ease the pain and abstraction of spreadsheet. It captures the nearest point to an empty. So you can view index no and its attributes( position, normal, edge angle, edge length, face area). “Expand Selection” node group expands your selection in preferred axis. “Compare” node group compares some attributes of selected index to your mesh. So a lot of possibilities for quick masking.
index-selector.blend (4.6 MB)