Can Hero Skill be preselected?

Is there a way to make it such that a hero skill is already selected (and thus the button placement already there) when the hero is created?

Two reasons I need this:
1) if I can preselect the buttons ahead of time, then I can determine where other skills go relative to it.
2) I am using the unit - replace action on the hero, and I'd like the replacement to be seamless. When you replace a hero, the experience is the same, but you have to select the skills all over again.

Yes you can do that. If you played the warcraft 3 campaign you may have noticed that on some levels you recieved heroes with pre-chosen skills. Assuming that the hero is the right level, you can make a hero learn skills like this:

Hero - Learn Skill

Learn Skill for (Last replaced unit) - SKILL

Just replae SKILL with whatever skill you want from the list. Remember that for a hero to learn the skills, it must be high enough level, thus, you cannot make a level 1 hero learn a level 6 spell through this trigger.

EDIT: I mis read your post and this might be kinda wrong... You might want to do this through an if then else action. For conditions you *could* use if a certain skill is learned, than select that skill for the hero. I'm not sure if this would work because I've never tried it, but I think it should work.

if you want to set skills on a unit, then double click on the unit in the world editor and up his level to what it needs to be and then add the skill points to the appropriate skills.

froggie the unit then has to be a global, and thats not always possible, go with got_ammo's suggestion. And you may also need to use the trigger "Hero set level (or exp) hide level up graphics"