Need to shorten this to add a few more possibilities at the moment it will
only handle "EI" and "EW" but I need it to handle 3 or four more. Was
thinking a table of some sort based on the piece of the lookup cell I want to
look at but have no real idea of where to start

Hope you can follow the arguments it is very much on the edge of my own
experience level

=IF(ISERROR(FIND("EW",'Previous Project'!A5)),IF(ISERROR(FIND("EI",'Previous
Project'!A5)),'Previous Project'!A5,IF(ISERROR(FIND("R",'Previous
Project'!A5)),REPLACE('Previous Project'!A5,SEARCH("-",'Previous
Project'!A5),1,"*-"),REPLACE('Previous Project'!A5,(SEARCH("R",'Previous
Project'!A5))+1,SEARCH("-",'Previous Project'!A5)-SEARCH("R",'Previous
Project'!A5),"*-")))," ")