Numbers changing to hashtags when converting to any date format

I have a column in my spreadsheet for the date with digits in the form mmddyyyy. That is the only text in that column. If I try to change it to a date as mm/dd/yyyy, it changes those numbers to an infinite number of #. I have increased the column width to 200 so that it takes up the entire window and it just fills with hashtags.

The other issue is that this of the date is '01012026 it doesn't convert to anything. It remains exactly that. If the date is 1012026, it converts to 10/30/4670. Other dates where the leading zero was removed also convert to dates far into the future. I will post an image of this in comments that show the future date issue and the hashtag issue.

The most important of these issues is the hashtag problem. The leading zeros issue I can handle by allowing excel to remove the leading zeros and manually changing each cell to d/mm/yyyy.

This happens on any spreadsheet from what I can tell. Even if I begin a new spreadsheet, I still have the same issues. And it happens on the two versions of Excel I have tried it on-- Office 365 and Office 2019. Thanks in advance!