1B - Spreadsheet was extremely challenging for me; it took me over 2 hours to get AC. I didn't find the editorial helpful, and then when I went to see practice solutions from red/orange people, it made even less sense (they were basically copy/paste with minor variation):

    #include<cstdio>
    void g(int t){if(t){g((t-1)/26);putchar(65+(t-1)%26);}}
    int main(){
    	int n,x,y;
    	char s[64],*p;
    	for(scanf("%d ",&n);n--;){
    		gets(s);
    		if(sscanf(s,"%*c%d%*c%d",&x,&y)==2){
    			g(y);
    			printf("%d\n",x);
    		}else{
    			for(x=0,p=s;*p>64;++p)
    				x=x*26+*p-64;
    			printf("R%sC%d\n",p,x);
    		}
    	}
    	return 0;
    }

I'll talk about each part of the problem itself and approaches/alternatives, and then explain (in unnecessary detail) how the above solution handles it.

Problem statement

Input: First line is an int representing the number of test cases. Each following line is a string of characters specifying a spreadsheet cell, in one of two formats:

• "Excel": ^[A-Z]+[0-9]+\$ (e.g. BB352).
• "RC": ^R[0-9]+C[0-9]+\$ (e.g. R253C55).

Output: For test case, we must output the same cell specified in the opposite format. Example:

2
R23C55
BC23

should output

BC23
R23C55

Constraints:

• Between 1 and 10000 test cases (all valid in either format)
• In each case, the row and column numbers are no larger than 1000000 (so each line is 16 chars at longest since we never exceed R1000000C1000000 / BDWGN1000000).

Approach

Our implementation needs to do 3 things:

• Convert from Excel to RC
• Convert from RC to Excel
• Determine which format the input is in, and do the right conversion on it

Determine format