Like other KOffice applications, on startup Kivio presents a startup dialog. The dialog offers a choice of creating a new document, opening a saved document or choosing a document from a list of recently saved files.

If you're new to Kivio begin by creating an empty document by double-clicking on the Empty Document template.

Kivio's main window contains a view of the current document. The page outline and margins are shown, as is a grid. Surrounding this view are horizontal and vertical rules. By default a tools toolbar is placed on the left-hand side and beneath the document view is a page selector. Beneath that is the status bar which shows the current position of the mouse pointer as a location on the page.

At the top of the window are the two main toolbars. These contain buttons for the most commonly used features of Kivio.