More On Oracle External Table

Personally, I prefer external table over SQL Loader. When possible, I created a external table and run some queries to make sure the text file looks good. Then I loaded them as a table or materialized view. Basically I run the one of the following queries to load the data.
create table tbl_actual_tab as select * from tbl_external_table;
 or
create materialized view tbl_actual_tab as select * from tbl_external_table;