In one of my projects, I needed to add a single cell (SubItem) selection in Report style list control. By default, List control has full row selection style that can be set using "LVS_EX_FULLROWSELECT" as a flag in SetExtendedStyle().
To select a subitem in Report style list control, you have to set LVS_OWNERDRAWFIXED style and have to implement DrawItem() function in your CListCtrl derived class.
Following is the implementation of DrawItem function that shows selection around a subitem in report style list control.