Convert an excel or spreadsheet column letter to its number in Pythonic fashion

Question

Is there a more pythonic way of converting excel-style columns to numbers (starting with 1)?

Working code up to two letters:

Answer 1

You could use this oneliner using comprehension and string that is fairly easy to use:

sum([string.ascii_lowercase.index(c) + 26 ** i for i,c in enumerate(col_letters)])