You need the full path in the exclude file. I created mine via ls /home/JSMITH/data/*.txt > /home/JSMITH/excludes.txt
If you're doing it by hand, make certain you haven't got any trailing whitespace. Also, I used Notepad++ when I created mine by hand. I found that the green screen edtf created an EBCDIC file with CRLF in it, and that didn't exclude for me.
IBM i 7.1