Microsoft® Office v. X for Mac VS Office XP pc

Is it practicle to have a mac ibook notebook computer for class notes, and campus computing? If the ibook has: Microsoft® Office v. X (OR LOWER) for Mac, and there is Office XP on my home desktop, is file merging easy? will the doc files be recognizable and swappable, to be editted, or printed, etc? what are the limitations???????????
Thanks.