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

In Python, without reduce:

def transform(column_string):
    return sum((ascii_uppercase.index(letter)+1) * 26**position for position, letter in enumerate(column_string[::-1]))