Changing Default Settings
To specify default settings for text and graphics objects (such as fill and outline settings, text font and style and so on) in CorelDRAW 8, do the following:
- Open Options dialog by selecting Tools/Options... pressing Ctrl-J.
- Go to Document/Styles item in the options tree.
- In the list in the middle of the dialog highlight the item you want to change style for. Select Default Graphic, Default Artistic Text, or Default Paragraph Text to set settings for graphic objects, artistic or paragraph text objects respectively. You can select other style sheets present in your document such as Bullet text.
- Click the Edit... buttons for Text, Fill and Outline properties to change the default look of the kind of objects you selected.
- After you made all your changes, you need to make them permanent in order to use them in all new documents or else the changes will be valid only for the currently open document. To do this, select the Document node in the Options dialog list. Check Save options as default for new documents and make sure the Styles checkbox is checked.
- Press OK to close the dialog. Your new settings will be saved and you can use them for all new documents you create in CorelDRAW. Note, the changes are actually written only when you exit CorelDRAW, so if CorelDRAW crashes or hangs after you changed the settings, they will be lost. You may want to exit and restart CorelDRAW as soon as you made changes to styles to make sure they are saved.
In CorelDRAW 7 you need to do this another way (however this method is also acceptable
in CorelDRAW 8). Open Graphics and Text Styles roll-up from the Layout menu. Select one of
the styles you need to change (Default Graphic, Default Artistic Text, or Default
Paragraph Text), click it with the right mouse button and select Properties
from the pop-up menu. Edit the style as you wish then click on the small 
button in the roll-up
and select Template/Save As Default for New Documents.
If you need to modify several parameters, not all style properties, you can do this much easier. For example, you need to change the default font for the Artistic Text, then change it in Text toolbar or press Ctrl-T to bring up Format Text dialog. When you made changes to attributes, CorelDRAW will ask you whether you want to apply the changes to Artistic text or Paragraph text (or both). Check the appropriate checkbox and press OK. Then go to Graphics and Text Styles roll-up and save the changes for all new documents as described above. The same way you can change, fill or outline fill or attributes. For instance, click the color in the Color palette with no objects selected to assign default fill color for new objects and so on.
But don't forget to save changes for the new documents.