Baffled by M-x align/ align-regexp

[Sivaram Neelakantan]

I wanted to align text and so rooted around the manual to find out how
to do it.  Found align but couldn't figure how to get it to align text
the way I wanted.

Say I want to go from 

1 200 3 4
10 11 12 14
999 10 4000 897

to 

1   200 3    4
10  11  12   14
999 10  4000 897

How do I do that?  I tried M-x align, align-regexp with \\( +\\), with
C-u 3 M-x align-regexp \\( +\\) and leaving the rest as
defaults.  Nothing worked. 

Is this the right function to use?  I'd expect,with text too,I'd have
a similar requirement; either right or left justified.

 sivaram
 -- 
Win 32 Emacs-22.2