I would like to print a list of information from two columns of Numbers

Command P has been the shortcut for "Print" for quite a while. Command N in Preview is "New from Clipboard", which has also been around for quite a while. If you copy a range of cells in a table, you can use New From Clipboard in Preview to create a PDF of it, as an image. Or you can paste it into a Pages document as a table. Or you can paste it into TextEdit as a table (if the document is set to RTF) or as tab delimited text (if the document is set to plain text). You can print from any of those three apps with Command P.

"When I hit command-N in Preview all I get is a ding"

Is there anything copied to the Clipboard when you do this?

"When I paste/command-V into Pages, all I get is a ding."

Is there anything copied to the Clipboard when you do this?

If you have not copied or cut anything to the Clipboard, there is nothing to provide Preview with to create a new document, and there is nothing to provide "Paste" to paste into Pages.

Have you tried choosing the New from Clipboard menu item in the File menu of Preview or the Paste menu item in the Edit menu of Pages?

Here are the steps to insert an image of the two columns in a Preview document:

Copy the Table or part of the table. (For the example, I selected the part of the table shown below, then copied that selection to the clipboard (command-C)

With the two columns copied to the clipboard, I opened Preview and made the menu choice shown below:

The result in Preview was a new (untitled) document showing the selected part of the table that had been copied:

I then Saved the Preview document.

Then in Pages, I used the Insert menu to insert the .pdf image into a Pages document.

With this result:

Regards,

Barry