If you put some single characters in column A and this in column B:

=code(a1)
(and drag down)

You'll see that each character has a numeric representation.

A = 65
a = 97
.. = 46

Maybe you could use those codes to get your checksum.

=SUMPRODUCT(CODE((MID(A1,ROW(INDIRECT("1:"&LEN(A1) )),1))))

or maybe better:

=IF(A1="","",SUMPRODUCT(CODE((MID(A1,ROW(INDIRECT( "1:"&LEN(A1))),1)))))

Note that these will evaluate the same:

ABCD
DBCA
ACBD
(and so forth)

But maybe it's close enough???

============
Are you worried about having duplicates in your data?

If yes, you may want to read Chip Pearson's treatise on Duplicates:
http://www.cpearson.com/excel/duplicat.htm


Kestrel1492 wrote:

I Hope I'm just overlooking a stock standard way to do this, but:

I'd like to find a fairly simple way to convert text in a cell to a
numerical value, that I can then use as a checksum.
I don't mean cells containing the word"one" would equal 1, but rather
something like ("o"=15)+("n"=14)+("e"=5)=34
I want to use it to help uniquely identify rows, so it has to be
simple, or it will take too long to execute and be counter productive.

Thanks,
Kestrel

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Dave Peterson