The Grad School requires a table of contents (ToC), a list of figures (LoF), and a list of tables (LoT) in your thesis. LaTeX will automatically produce all of these. The ToC entries come from all of your "\chapter", "\section", "\subsection", etc. commands. The LoF and LoT come from the "\caption" commands in the figure and table environments. All of these commands have an optional "table of contents entry" field.
- \chapter, \section, etc. -- the normal title you give these will probably be OK for the ToC, however, if you want you can specify a ToC entry by: "\chapter[ToC entry]{actual chapter title to appear in the document}"
- \caption -- same thing as the sectioning commands: "\caption[LoF/T entry]{actual caption to appear with the figure/table}"
Caveat for deluxetables
There is no way to specify a LoT entry for a deluxetable! Deluxetable uses the \tablecaption command, and whatever you put in there as the table title will appear as the LoT entry -- if this offends you, then just use the table and tabular environment instead of deluxetable. Also, if your deluxetable extends on to multiple pages, it will add an entry into the LoT for each page the table falls on (which can be exceedingly obnoxious) -- you will probably want to use longtable if you have tables that cover multiple pages.