My embroidery file opens as a word document?

Its a common scenario for a different application to become associated with your embroidery files. For example, when you click on an embroidery file, it is being opened up in some text editor. The computer basically has instructions that say "open all JEFs with Word, unless otherwise commanded." It's not that you're getting a text file, it's just that the computer is opening the file as if it were a text file.

We can give our computers instructions to open files with any program at all -- even one that isn't equipped to open the file.  If your embroidery files look like blank sheets of paper, your computer has an instruction to (by default, unless you click Embrilliance) open the file with a word processing program like notepad or something like that, or maybe no selected default at all.

This can happen by accidentally clicking "open-with" and choosing the wrong program once.?  

Here's how to fix it since you have Thumbnailer, and assuming you have Windows 10.
For other operating system help links, scroll to the bottom of this page.

Find Thumbnailer on your Start Menu, under Embrilliance. Open the Thumbnailer window. It will ask you to allow the program to make changes to your computer.  Pick "yes."

In the Thumbnailer window, click the boxes next to the formats you want Thumbnailer to display.  

Right now, my Thumbnailer window looks like the picture above (with nothing selected), and my embroidery files folder looks like this:

Every embroidery file looks like a blank sheet of paper.

Now I'll click the "hus" checkbox in Thumbnailer, and click "ok"

And close and re-open that embroidery folder:

Look, now each one looks like an embroidery file and gives me the hint in the corner that Embrilliance software has generated the image for me.

Presto!

If this didn't work for you, or you have another operating system besides Windows 10, here are some other options:

Here is a tutorial on how to designate which application will open specific file types: How to Assign a File Type to an Application in Mac OS X Lion

Here is a tutorial on how to change file type associations in Windows 7: Change the program that opens a type of file

Here is a tutorial on how to change a file type association in Windows 10:

How to Change File Associations in Windows 10