We faced the exact same issue in our co. Our tests output excel workbooks. Binary diff was not an option. So we rolled out our own simple command line tool. Check out the ExcelCompare project. Infact this allows us to automate our tests quite nicely. Patches / Feature requests quite welcome!

How do you configure it to ignore files?

Ignore is configured in a normal text file called .hgignore in the root of your repository. Add it just like a normal file with:

hg add .hgignore

There are two syntax options available for file matching, glob and regexp. glob is unix-like filename expansion and regexp is regular expressions. You activate each by adding syntax: glob or syntax: regexp on a line by itself. All lines following that will use that syntax, until the next syntax marker. You can have as many syntax markers as you want. The default syntax is regexp, so if you only use regexp you don't need any syntax marker.

You can add comments with #

Example:

# python temporary files
syntax: glob
*.pyc

#editor autosaves
*~

# temporary data
syntax: regexp
temp

Ignore only applies to unmanaged files (i.e. files that are not already checked in). To ignore files that are under version control, you can use the switches -I and -X.