Why is my word document listed under "others" and can't be opened with word?

I'm using 2008 Word for Mac on my Macbook Pro, and for some reason every time I save a document it is listed under "others" instead of "documents" along with my other word documents. I didn't have this problem before but for some reason it started doing this, and now every time I try to send a word document by email, my receiver (and myself when I tried opening it from "sent items") aren't able to open the document.

The thumbnail of the document in my Finder is still the Microsoft logo, but once I attach it to an email the thumbnail becomes blank and when the receiver tries to open it, it says that the file is not supported. When I tried opening the attached document, it doesn't automatically open with Word but with TextEdit instead.

Anyone have any ideas on what's going on with my Word? 😟