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.
As mentioned, in Excel, macros are written in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). Macros writing using VBA is done in the VBA editor window, which can be opened by clicking on the Visual Basic icon on the Developers tab of the ribbon (see below for instructions on adding the Developers tab to the ribbon if needed).