CrossRoads:
"when I turned the board over to the front that the columns were now backwards"
But you can fix that in software - swap the bytes end for end that go to the max7219 registers:
Data intended for Register1 goes to Register8, and data for Register8 goes to Register1 instead.
This happened months ago. I just swapped the order of the 8 wires, only took a couple of minutes.