Thank you both for responding. Due to technical problems on my end it took me a while to find this question again. (For some reason FireFox doesn’t give access to the reply box and Explorer takes three to five minutes to refresh each time I move to a different page on this post.)
OK, here is an example image. Suppose for each of the top faces of this cube I wanted to then extrude them out like the tentacles of a squid, gracefully waving in the air or moving to grasp something. If I do the ‘click-by-click’ method it would become an editing nightmare, but if each face were extruded along a path it would just mean editing the path.