Guidance needed on how to light up many lights on one column of max.

Projects General Guidance
2

Someplace in there you control the data byte that gets sent to register 0,1,2,3,4 for the 5 columns. You need to manipulate that byte:

add in bit 0:
dataByte = dataByte | 0x01; // 0b00000001

add in bit 1:
dataByte = dataByte | 0x02; // 0b00000010

add in bit 2:
dataByte = dataByte | 0x04; // 0b00000100

add in bit 3:
dataByte = dataByte | 0x08; // 0b00001000

add in bit 4:
dataByte = dataByte | 0x10; // 0b00010000

clear whole:
dataByte = 0;