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.
Macros can be used to make certain tasks less repetitive by representing a complicated sequence of keystrokes, mouse movements, commands, or other types of input. In computer programming, macros are a tool which allow a developer to re-use code. For instance, in the C programming language, this is an example of a simple macro definition which incorporates arguments : #define square(x) ((x) * (x)). After being defined like this, our macro can be used in the code body to find the square of a number. When the code is preprocessed before compilation, the macro will be expanded each time it occurs.