Led shift out

Other Hardware LEDs and Multiplexing
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Greetings members, first post here.

Recently i bought the arduino uno and duemilanove and i am having great fun with the tutorials so far. The last one i did was the Serial to Parallel Shifting-Out with a 74HC595. Since i scavenged an led board from an emergency light i decided to make this work in a similar fashion, just to display text and not to blink. The led board is 3x13 so i got five of the 74hc595, i got them connected and they work fine. For the part of the coding i have a problem with understanding how to do this best. The example Dual Defined Arrays uses two separate arrays, one for the green led's and one for the red led's. I want to use 2d array to control the led's. Can i do this? As i said the led board is 3x13 and the connections are set left to right by rows so the first ic has 8 led in the first row, the second ic in the first and second row, the third in the second row and so forth... My idea was to control them all at once and not just sending 8 bits like in the example. Can you point to some other examples or show some code of how to do this?

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I have some code for the 595 here:

It may or may not help.

You have to send batches of 8 bits, that's the way the shift registers work. But you can set up an internal array (buffer) with all the bit patterns in it, and then shift the lot out.

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Thanks for the help i looked at the code and tried to make it work for my project but it didn't. I made the wiring as described pins 10, 11 and 13 fromy arduino to the three pins 12, 14, 11 on the 74hc959. Another thing i noticed is that the only declared pin in the code is the latch pin 10. Is this how it supposed to be or the SPI has it's own predefined pins on the arduino for DS and SH_CP? Still looking for solution but thanks for your help.

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SPI has predefined pins that match up with its internal hardware - D11, D12, D13 for MOSI, MISO, and SCK.
D10 (SPI SS) is under user control and is normally set to an output and used as ChipSelect, or as the LATCH (output register clock) with simple shift register chips.

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