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

There is a way to make it more pythonic (works with three or more letters and uses less magic numbers):

def col2num(col):
    num = 0
    for c in col:
        if c in string.ascii_letters:
            num = num * 26 + (ord(c.upper()) - ord('A')) + 1
    return num

And as a one-liner using reduce (does not check input and is less readable so I don’t recommend it):

col2num = lambda col: reduce(lambda x, y: x*26 + y, [ord(c.upper()) - ord('A') + 1 for c in col])