When you open the NodeXL Excel Template from the Windows Start Menu, Excel creates a new workbook from the template and opens the workbook. This NodeXL workbook differs from a standard Excel workbook in that it contains multiple worksheets that have been customized for network graph data, a custom Graph Pane used to display the network graph, and a custom NodeXL tab in the Excel Ribbon that contains commands specific to NodeXL.
These features appear only in NodeXL workbooks, and they are removed entirely from Excel when you close the NodeXL workbook.1
The following diagram shows the NodeXL worksheets, the Graph Pane and the NodeXL tab in the Excel Ribbon.