Raw troops seemed to fire high - probably because they aimed straight enough, but the musket's kick jerked the barrel up enough to affect the trajectory - so they were constantly being reminded to aim low. Riflemen? Probably not, because they went through intensive aiming and firing training, so by the time they deployed they probably knew their business. But you didn't really 'aim' a musket. You pointed it and let fly, because it's so inaccurate - the deadliness of a musket was volley fire, but not if the balls flew over the enemy's head.
They used the column because of their conscript army. It took an immense amount of time to train troops to the complicated manouevers needed to go from column to line, line to columns, either to square and so on, and Napoleon liked to get his levies into battle fast, and it was much easier to train them to attack in column rather than in line - especially as holding the dressing of a line during manouevers is extraordinarily difficult. And remember that the column had been immesnely successful for Napoleon when facing Austrian, Prussian and Russian armies. It had a huge psychological advantage - the men in the column felt they were part of an overwhelming mass, and their enemies saw it as an unstoppable juggernaut. Napoleon chided his generals for using the column against British troops - he said they should have softened up the British with massed artillery (which rather ignored Wellington's preferred tactic of sheltering his men from cannon fire by positioning them on a reverse slope). At Waterloo the French columns were supposed to deploy into line at the last moment - thus they could advance fast in a column and then, when the firefight began, deploy outwards, but British musket fire was simply too much and the deployment never took place. I can't think of an occasion when a French column beat a British line - though they certainly came close at Talavera and during the counter-attack at Salamanca