User profiles help you to standardize the look and feel of your models and to support standards. Profiles allow you to group options and preferences together for sharing and reuse across your organization. Various profiles are provided with PowerDesigner, and you can create your own.
Display Preferences – [model or registry] to control the color, shape, size, etc. of your diagram symbols and the information that is displayed upon them (see Display Preferences).
Model Options – [model only] to control naming conventions, case sensitivity, notation, default values, etc (see the appropriate modeling guide).
General Options – [registry only] to control dialog preferences, environment variables, fonts, etc (see General Options).
Check Model options – [model only] to control which checks are applied, and which are errors, warnings, etc (see Checking Models).
Other options – [registry only] such as the layout of toolbars and windows (see Organizing Views), favorite property tabs (see Customizing a Property Sheet), default columns for object lists (see Customizing Object List Columns and Filtering Lists), etc.
The result will be that table symbols are drawn in green, and view symbols are drawn in blue. You can, of course, override these default preferences and options locally in the model.
User profiles are PowerDesigner resource files, and so can be opened and edited in the resource editor, but in general you will create and edit them by extracting preferences defined in a model, or from your registry.