I'm working on a little tool for myself to help solve some puzzles (yes, I see the irony in needing help to make a helper tool).

In short, I need to be able to take a word (such as "Zucchini") of any length and create the numerical version of it according to the letters. It's hard to explain. "Zucchini," for example, would turn into 8 7 1 2 3 4 6 5. Each letter is given a number according to its alphabetical position in the word. Does that make sense? I hope it makes sense.

Some other examples, for clarity:

ABBEY = 12345

ROPE = 4231

MONUMENT = 26483157

I currently have a long list of words that I want to turn into their alphabetical/numerical version. I've divided each word into separate letters (spread horizontally across columns), but I'm struggling to figure out where to go from here. I definitely don't mind using helper columns.

Part of the intricacy is that, for the formula to work universally, it must be able to account for blank cells (due to words that are longer than others) as well as repeated letters in a word (such as in ABBEY above, where the "B"s are identified in numerical order -- the first becomes a 2 and the second becomes a 3).

Any ideas/suggestions?

Edit: Version is Excel 2016

Edit: Each number will end up in its own cell; there's no issue with longer words that would end up with some 2-digit numbers. "Telephones," for example, would turn into | 10 | 1 | 5 | 2 | 8 | 4 | 7 | 6 | 3 | 9 |