I learned two things I didn’t know about Magit from a post by Marcin Borkowski (mbork). The first is that you can exclude files locally. That is, you can ignore files just as if they were in .gitignore but that information doesn’t get committed as it does with .gitignore. That’s handy when you’re working in a team and have some local files that are peculiar to you and that you don’t want committed.
The other information is how to add those files to the exclude list from within Magit. Head on over to mbork’s post to get all the details.