The taskbar displays a list of small icons, one for each window on the desktop. In the default KDE setup the taskbar is located inside the panel, but it can also be located at the top or the bottom of the screen.

The taskbar is very powerful. In the default configuration, if you have more than one window from the same application open, they will be “grouped”, so that you see one icon per application in the taskbar.

A simple left mouse button click on the taskbar button will pop up a list of the open windows for that application and you can choose the window you want to use. Choosing one of these entries with the left will bring you to the selected window immediately. Click on a taskbar entry with the right and you will see a menu allowing you to operate on all the windows grouped under that icon, or each window individually.

You can choose to see all the windows on all the desktops in your taskbar, no matter which desktop you are currently viewing, or to only see the icons for the desktop you are looking at. You can also choose to ungroup the icons, so that each open window will have its own icon in the taskbar. These and many more options are available simply by right clicking on the taskbar handle (the small textured bar at the left hand side) and choosing Configure Taskbar....

The icons on the taskbar resize themselves to make room for applications, so you can fit many more applications than you might think. Making the panel wider will let the taskbar icons take on a row and column layout, but they will still resize to fit more icons.