Think about the following different cases:
ab[][][][]
[]ab[][][]
[][]ab[][]
[][][]ab[]
[][][][]ab
How many possibilities are there for case 1?
Can you see why there are the same number of possibilities for each of the five cases?
If so, take the number of possibilities for case 1 and multiply by 5.
Let $W(c,n)$ denote the number of words of length $c$ from an alphabet of $n$ letters. Then $W(c,n)=n^c$.
Out of these, the number of words of the same size that do not contain one of the letters is $W(c,n-1)=(n-1)^c$. The number of ways of choosing which letter is missing is $\binom{n}{1}$.
The number of words of the same size that do not contain two letters is $W(c,n-2)=(n-2)^c$. The number of ways of choosing which two letters are missing is $\binom{n}{2}$... and so on ...
Now we use inclusion-exclusion principle: (subtract the number of words missing one of the letters, then add the number missing two of the letters, subtract the number missing three of the letters,...)
We get:
$$W(c,n)-\binom{n}{1}W(c,n-1)+\binom{n}{2}W(c,n-2)-\binom{n}{3}W(c,n-3)+\cdots+(-1)^{n-1}\binom{n}{n-1}W(c,n-(n-1)).$$
This is
$$n^c-\binom{n}{1}(n-1)^c+\binom{n}{2}(n-2)^c-\binom{n}{3}(n-3)^c+\cdots+(-1)^{n-1}\binom{n}{n-1}1^c.$$
or
$$\sum_{k=0}^{n-1}(-1)^k\binom{n}{k}(n-k)^c.$$
Another way could be: Denote $S_c^n$ the number of ways to partition the word of length $c$ into $n$ pieces. Then we just need to choose which letter goes to each of the $n$ pieces. This number is $n!$. So the number of words we are looking for is
$$n!S_c^n.$$
The numbers $S_c^n$ are called Stirling's numbers of the second kind.
Best Answer
The reason is because $26^5$ is the list of all strings of length five, and while there are six different ways to insert an "a" into each of those strings, some of those strings already have an "a" or more than one "a" in them. We don't want to use $25^5 * 6$ either as this doesn't include strings that have more than one "a". The easiest way is to count all the strings of length six ($26^6$) and remove those that don't have an "a" in them ($25^6$)