Strategy for creating a dictionary

Sure you can use Excel to prepare your data.

You can use a mail merge to import to Word but it is faster to simply copy and paste it to bring it into Word. Once there you can apply styles to the columns (character style for column 1) and then convert table to text in order to get the paragraph type layout.

Personally, I would probably do this in Word although you could also do the data input and/or page layout in any of those programs you mentioned. Word and Publisher both give you more flexibility in how you might format the text (bold, italics etc) whereas Excel and Access enable more structure for your data entry.

How you layout the final document depends entirely on how you want it to appear. A table can be clean but takes up more space than allowing the definition to wrap back under the 'word'. It forces you to deal with questions like - Does the first column need to be wide enough to deal with the longest word or can we wrap text in that column too? Dictionaries traditionally avoid tables and put both into the same paragraph and show the word in bold (you would do the same using a character style). This keeps page counts to a minimum.

Word has the StyleRef field to allow your header to display the first and last occurrences of a style on the page ( eg. egg-egret).