Proposals for the subsidy of a telegraph line to California were made in Congress throughout the 1850s, and in 1860 the U.S. Post Office was authorized to spend $40,000 per year to build and maintain an overland line. The year before, the California State Legislature had authorized a similar subsidy of $6,000 per year.
Click OK on the dialogue box and your text is centred. That's the long way round. Clicking the centre icon on the toolbar is much easier - it's a very useful Macro built in to Microsoft Word. A Macro is a way to create a shortcut for a task that you do a lot. You can create your own macros. The macro we're going to create in the next section is a very simple one, but macros don't have to be simple. You can open up the Visual Basic editor and create a very complex macro indeed.
Record a macro. Edit a macro (3:29) Watch this video to see how to edit a macro in a special text editor called the Visual Basic Editor. Visual Basic is the programming language that macros are recorded in. Save your macro (3:09) To make sure your macro is always available on your computer, save it to your Personal Macro Workbook, which is a special hidden workbook that loads every time you start Excel.