I'm sure this is a case of "can't see the forest for the trees". I have searched and read but can not for the life of me understand the following:

I am designing a project for a Boy Scout electronics merit badge. I need to keep the circut wiring simple, therefore I want to use the pins of the 16F690 PIC as they are physically oriented on the PIC package.

I want to use A1,A2,C0,C1,C2,B4,B5,B6 as the column of an 8x8 led matrix.
How do I assign those unrelated pins to one 8 bit variable?
I think it must have something to do with the use of ALIASES??

Thanks in advance. I think there must be some thick fog in the old gray matter.
(and the fact that I only dabble in programming)