Programming Riddle: How might you translate an Excel column name to a number?

Question

I was recently asked in a job interview to resolve a programming puzzle that I thought it would be interesting to share. It\'s about translating Excel column letters to actu

Answer 1

I wrote this ages ago for some Python script:

def index_to_int(index):
    s = 0
    pow = 1
    for letter in index[::-1]:
        d = int(letter,36) - 9
        s += pow * d
        pow *= 26
    # excel starts column numeration from 1
    return s