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

Just keep ORing them in. Any bits that are already a 1 will stay a 1.

dataByte starts at 0.

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

add in bit 1:
dataByte = dataByte | 0x02; // 0b00000010
dataByte is now 0b00000011

add in bit 3:
dataByte = dataByte | 0x08; // 0b00001000
dataByte is now 0b00001011

add in bit 4:
dataByte = dataByte | 0x10; // 0b00010000
dataByte is now 0b00011011