Pages was never developed to be a clone, or even a remote competitor of MS Word. The feature gap is enormous.
Let's say you have inserted a paragraph of text into Pages v8.2.1. You want to follow that with two-column layout, but as you have discovered, the column break also advances to the next page. When it does that, add the content right there that goes into your two-column layout, select all of it, and set the Layout panel to two columns. Now place your cursor at the beginning of that two-column content and backspace. The two-column layout will retreat to the previous page, and now appears just below your first paragraph. At the end of your current two column content, Insert Column break right inside the second column. Off you go to a new page again.
On the next page, where you want to resume in single column mode, first paste that content there. It too will take on a column format. Select this new text, and then revisit the layout tab, and set the column count back to 1. The content on the new page will now return to normal paragraph content, and you can place the cursor at the beginning of this text, and back space to place it immediately under your two-column content — if it will fit on the page.
The end result appears thus:
I have forced a return to open gaps between layout locations. You could do the same thing in Layout mode with three text boxes.
When you export the above Pages document layout to Word .docx from Pages v8.2.1, it will lose the layout shown above, and just become all paragraphs. This document translation process during export to Word .docx does not guarantee that a Pages document layout will faithfully be represented in Word. Alternatively with Word v16.30 or later supporting the opening of PDF and conversion of that PDF to Word .docx, it might be practical to export complex Pages document layouts as PDF, and see how Word 16.30 handles that conversion.
