Changing default properties of Omnigraffle objects

When you draw a rectangle, line, or other object in Omnigraffle, it comes with a default set of properties.

For example, out of the box, newly drawn rectangles will have a white fill color, a black stroke color, and Helvetica 13 as their font, among other default settings chosen by the creators of Omnigraffle.

It is likely that these properties are not what you want each time you draw an object with that tool. For example, by default, any rectangle you draw will have a shadow. Unless you are using Omnigraffle to create flow charts, you probably don't want a shadow on every rectangle you draw.

But changing the way newly drawn objects appear is easy and well worth doing. I'll go through two methods here:

Method 1: Use the tool's Inspect Style menu

First, select the tool whose default settings you want to change in the toolbar. Here we want to change the settings for the rectangle within the Shape tool:

Once selected, long-click on that tool (or, hit the tiny dropdown arrow at the bottom of the tool). This will open a menu:

Verify that the tool you want to change is checked in the menu, and then choose Inspect Style from that menu. 

You'll notice that after you select Inspect Style, the tool will display a blue background:

As long as this background is blue, each property you set using the Inspectors changes the default settings for that particular tool. (Note: the icon may have a smaller, dark-blue "i" icon on top of it. That doesn't matter. The key is that the background behind the icon is blue.)

Once you are done setting all the properties that this tool should assign to objects it draws, click another tool in the toolbar. This will exit the tool-changing mode, and each new object you draw with the changed tool will receive the properties you set.

Method 2: Use the Style Tray

The Style Tray lives at the bottom of the document screen and iconically displays various properties of the selected object. Here it is when a rectangle is selected:

You can drag these style icons - which the Omnigraffle folks call "style chits" - from the Style Tray onto another object. This assigns various properties of the selected object to that other object. (See the post Masking and cropping images for more details on using the the Style Tray.)

You can also drag these chits onto the selected tool in the toolbar at the top of the screen to assign the selected object's properties to the tool's default properties.

So, to change the default properties of a tool using the Style Tray:

1. Select the tool you want to change and draw an object using it.
2. Set all of the properties of the newly drawn object to the desired settings.
3. With the modified object selected, drag the left-most chit from the Style Tray (which represents all properties of the selected object) onto the tool you want to change in the toolbar.